My Year 10 have their GCSE exam tomorrow. As far as revision is concerned, it’s back to leading a horse to water etc. Short of revising for them (which, no doubt, some of them would appreciate) I don’t see what else I can do.
When we broke up for the Spring Bank half-term break I told them all to use the VLE and that I would be checking to see who had logged on and downloaded the revision material. When I checked on the Wednesday of that week it had crashed and was not available until Monday of this week. Great! However, only two students have subsequently told me that they couldn’t access it which is probably an indication of the numbers who actually tried.
Liam, I don’t see your name on the VLE.
“I know. I forgot.”
Forgot? Forgot the exam or the need to revise?
“Both.”
How? How do you do that?
I wrote to a number of parents before the break suggesting that their little darlings were not taking revision seriously. To my knowledge none of them have logged on so far and one came to me yesterday to ask how to do it. Yesterday.
Aren’t you cutting it a bit fine?
“It’ll be alright.”
Her name is still not appearing on my log-on statistics.
Yesterday I had three Yr 10 classes. I booked computer rooms for each occasion. I will lead the horses to water.
Group 1: top set. Purposeful work and all on task. I have no anxiety about this group.
Group 2: bottom set. The INTERNET crashed and so we could not access the revision material that way and had to return to the class for a text-book based revision lesson. None of them logged on overnight.
Group 3: an upper ability set.
When you print off revision sheets, don’t print as slides. Print as handouts so that you get eight slides to a page otherwise it’s a waste of paper.
I said that at least three times.
Literally hundreds of wasted full slide pages later ..... and no one is prepared to ‘fess up, so they remain uncollected. Another forest wasted.
Then there is the scrum around the printer because half of them don't have the wit to include a header with their name on it and it never occurred to me that I would need to tell them and so we are left with lots of odd pages and half presentations that haven't been picked up. More for the recycle bin.
I need to see from the stats that you have all accessed each of the topics.
When I check most of them have managed two. In an hour.
What do you have to do to make them take revision seriously?
Come and tell my daughter please! If I say the word 'revision?' again I will be shouted at. Bad case of not bothering here. Her stupid RE teacher predicted her an A* -the worst possible thing you can do to a vicars child. She's now working hard to get an acceptable C. Roll on tomorrow!
ReplyDeleteWhat do you have to do? Exactly what you are doing. Put the opportunity in front of them and then it's their responsibility. Who knows what these foundations, shaky as they are, might lead to? I was useless at Maths at school. I later went back to Night School to study for the "O Level" again.
ReplyDeleteI was still useless. :)
At least I then knew that my brain wasn't wired for algebra or geometry and that it wasn't the teaching. Strangely I can do "sums" and got both "O" and "A level" Accountancy.
I observed a student teacher with a Yr 9 class on quadratic equations. It was a great lesson but I had no idea what he was talking about.
ReplyDeleteTry a cattle prod.
ReplyDelete"I'm not bovvehd, voh."
ReplyDelete