Just as a question about the prescribed texts:
Our teacher for Extension 1 is a history teacher. As such, we spend most of our time studying the contexts of the text. Of course, the context is important, but how much is everyone else doing on the context of each text?
For example, at the moment we are studying The Cid, and our teacher has spent the last 6 hours of class discussing each of the contexts (original 11th century spain, 17th century france etc) and has been getting into great detail about the contexts - we spent 2 hours last week in a lecture at school about Cardinal de Richelieu and his life, and how this influenced his actions and hence the actions of Corneille.
Should I be worrying too much about the intricate aspects of the context, or concentrate more on the context itself and how it relates to the conventions?