Tag Archives: school

Back to school

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Yes, the adverts on telly might have been saying that for the past two months (which is really irritating) but I went back today and had a wonderous child free day doing “personal admin” and attending various meetings of dubious point.

Got back into the office and discovered everything as I’d left it, my PC still takes an age to apply my personal settings, the online registration system thinks I have two tutor groups, and it seems you really can get screen burn on LCD monitors if you leave them at the Windows login prompt for a few weeks (nothing to do with me, they were all off when the IT staff left seven weeks ago).

This year we’re starting some new courses with our kids, and I get to meet my new tutor group tomorrow, which will be nice…

Tomorrow I even get to do some teaching! Marvellous!

The end is nearly in sight

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Just a week and a half left at school before the end of this year. We are on week 38 of 39… The timetable is starting to fall apart as various groups of students go off on different school trips, work experience and badly timed holidays.

We’re introducing a new course next year for the GCSE kids, so have been up to our armpits in devising a whole new scheme of work, plus I’m making a website for my A-Level students to use next year. Gone are the printed sheets I used this year, it’s all been put into a website. If I’ve done this correctly, they should soon get into the habit of loading it up, finding today’s lesson and then getting on with it.

My aim is to get all the planning for next year done before we break up so that I don’t have to do any during the holidays. Plan B is to get enough planning done to last me until Christmas.

So a week and a half and then seven weeks of my own time.

The perils of cheap office furniture

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I broke my office chair today by snapping the back. The chair is a fairly standard “executive” high back gas-lift chair with recliner feature. On this particular make of chair, the recliner feature also triggers the gas-lift so the chair goes backwards and then drops in height. No idea why, it seems a bit of a strange combination.

Today, when I sat down the recline pin somehow moved causing the chair to both drop in height and tip backwards. Not expecting this, I almost fell off it, landing heavily on the backrest, making it bend and snap at its join with the chair base.

This got steadily worse over the rest of the day and I fully expect to be tipped backwards onto the floor sometime tomorrow as the chair finally gives up. I wouldn’t mind so much, but I share an office with two large blokes of above-average weight. They have the same chairs and subject them to far larger forces than me. Their chairs are OK, mine snapped. I weigh bugger all and am quite thin.

And so begins the long and complex system for returning faulty goods to a supply company. Why do I see the next 7 weeks with me sitting on a plastic chair?

Have GCSEs become easier?

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Maybe, maybe not. However here’s some exam questions from the 50s.

First we have some GCE O Level  General Science:

1.   State the Principle of Archimedes, and describe
carefully an experiment you have carried out to verify
this principle.
      Explain briefly (a) why a hydrogen balloon rises,
but will eventually stop rising; (b) how a balloonist can
control the altitude of his balloon.

And then on Monday 29th of June, 1959 at 2pm until 4:30pm you might have sat the “Universities of Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Birmingham Joint Matriculation Board”‘s GCE English Language Paper A. This is a scanned image so you’ll have to follow the link.

And to finish off, how about a nice bit of algebra.

Looks quite hard and testing doesn’t it. Lots of complex words, very terse layout and zero help given to the kids sitting the exam. It’s assumed they knew what to do. Proper exam.

Let’s look at modern equivalents since they seem to take a lot of criticism. Here are comparable exams that were sat last year. They’re real GCSEs, not “applied” or a “99% coursework with token exam” course.

English Physics Maths

There’s a very different style of exam paper now. They look more like application forms than a list of questions. There are boxes for marks, the kids doing the exam know what is expected of them (making education more about knowing what’s going on, rather than guessing what you’re supposed to do), and it tells them exactly what to do – so if they do it wrong nobody can complain “well I didn’t know I only had to answer one question”.

Look at the actual questions though; I don’t think the content of exams has become easier – the same sorts of things are still being tested. The difference is that the style of questioning and the layout of the paper has been made simpler.

Of course, what we can’t see from the old papers is what the grade boundaries are and what you needed for a C grade.

Aaand relax…

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After a crazy mental week I’ve finally reached the end… of both my sanity and the Year 11 teaching. All our year 11s have now left, only to return to do their exams. So now, after two years I’ve said bye to my tutor group. We had a trip to Alton Towers yesterday, and today they wandered about getting shirts signed before having a Record of Achievement ceremony in the hall.

I wonder what I’ll do with the spare time now that I don’t have to register a form every morning and afternoon, or make them do PSHE once a week.

I’ll miss most of them but there’s a small handful of my tutor group (and the year in general) that I won’t miss.

I get a new tutor group next September and the cycle begins again :)