GCSE Maths teacher……..

Indeed.

 

Spot on. My English teacher set something up with MacDonald's and we had a free school lunch in the library while we did our anthology notes. She didn't half drill me though. Every time I got a -C. I had to rewrite my essays in full. "-C in an exam is a D." She used to say.

She was very disappointed when I saw her on results day and told her I wanted to do engineering. She thought I might have made something of myself.

 

My theory is that if you can afford it and she is willing then the extra tuition can only have a positive effect.

 

From personal experience resits at College have a very poor pass rate. If a student has "failed" after 5 years in secondary to redeem that in about 50 hours is very difficult.
The real problem is that forcing students to "pass" GCSE is only going to put off a significant % of them. If I gave the GCSE syllabus to local businesses with a red pen and said cross out what you don't need from prospective employees there wouldn't be much left. Much more sensible would be to give students the basic numeracy needed, an ability to do some mental calculations, to read and understand graphs and charts , the ability to assess risks . Employers eg surveyors with trigonometry can then teach the skills needed for a particular job
Rant over!!

 

Where Maths suffers is it's boring. That's why "extra tuition" is difficult. People tend to take in what they're interested in. Extra Maths, extra boredom. Just because you want to be good at something doesn't necessarily mean you can deliver.
Needs to be a good tutor to make maths interesting.

 

Spot on.

 

One peace of GCSE advice and funnily enough it applies to Maths. Look at the number of marks available in brackets on each question. E.g (7).

When you get chance. Read the paper and look what each question is worth then come back to the (1) and (2) questions.

It's displaying method that the teachers marking the papers are looking for.

 

Please don't do this, it's absolutley sole destroying for a pupil trying to get a grade 4 pass. She'll waste so much time trying to answer them and become disheartened that her confidence will be so low she'll then not be able to answer the easier questions. The most important ones to get right are the 1, 2 and 3 markers, if you add them up she'll be very close to a pass.

 

Only 22.9% of students who resit pass. This is also made up of students trying too improve the pass they already got so it works out at around 1 in 5/6 a pretty poor rate. She needs to do all she can now to get that grade. Her teacher is the best person to advise on what she needs to do. A couple of tips though;

• Find out what exam board she's doing AQA, Edexcel or OCR.
• Get a revision book specific too the exam board, school will probably sell them.
  
• Get her her own calculator so she gets used too it. Casio is best but the new one does take a while to get used too.
• She can do past papers on www.mathsgenie.co.uk, they also have worked solutions and videos explaining what to do.
• She doesnt have to understand everything to get a pass, around 60% will be near.
• If her school uses Sparxsmaths for homework get her on theTarget and XP boost areas where she can do extra.
• Talk to her about real life maths like how overtime works, sales reductions, paying for things in instalments, the cost of going to the cinema, etc.

Most importantly be positive with her and also about maths. No one talks about being rubbish at english if they can't read, spell or do grammar properly. She's learn't so much in the 11 years she's been at school and she does understand things.

 

Only going off what I was told. Only failed Home Economics with a D. That was more because I didn't give a f cuk though. So yeah you're right.

 

My experience of college was quite different.

I left school with a D in English. And I needed a C for my job. So did a resit at college (Tuesday evenings) and ended up with a B (and only a couple of marks from an A). So it can definitely be done.

The difference.... I wasn't messing about at college like at school. And at college I was surrounded by people who wanted to learn, and more importantly, more mature folk.

So it can definitely work.

Granted this was mid to late 90s like.. so may very well be different these days.

 

Hi

I'm currently doing a degree in Maths with the OU (2 modules to do) I have taught a few kids (mainly foundation level) and from personal experience people tend to leave it too late to ask for help. I give my first session FOC - i say session as I don't charge by the hour. If you think I may be able to help please get in touch.

Steve