The run up to Christmas was immense and I was so tired when we
eventually got to the holidays. I find myself sleeping deeper and deeper as the
term ends and the holidays approach to the point that you are too tired to
dream. It was incredibly busy with fourth year prelims, a parents’
night, fun time happy quizzes, Christmas concerts and some teaching for good
measure. For the vast majority of time everything is awesome, students come to
class, engage, have fun and leave happy, having learned something new. It’s
been a fantastic school year so far with loads of highs and very few lows. What
does one write about when all is going great? There are only so many times I can
write about how awesome the first years are doing. Saying that, we recently
changed the level they were working at: we started doing the same work as the
top sets (I teach both first year second sets) and they are eating it up. They
did a fun time happy quiz not so long ago and absolutely beasted it.
I was very happy for them all and they were overjoyed to see the how the fruits
of their labour paid off. They are a mirror image of the fourth years - they did very little work last year, not a huge
amount this year and bombed at their first prelim. As they say “you reap
what you sow!”
The fourth years got a bit of a land when they got their prelim
(mocks) results back. In fairness, last year was very unstable for these
students; they had a few different teachers and not a lot of stability. This was
compounded by the fact that they took advantage of the lack of stability and
did absolutely no work last year. This was not idle preparation for their fourth year or their exam.
Hopefully the prelim results will awaken them to the mountain of work we will
have to get through to have any success this summer. Most of them totally
bombed in their exam and some of them would have been better off using their
paper to clean some windows for all the good writing on it did. All is not lost
though - the upside of this is that reality is finally starting to bite and
some of them are getting down to revision. We are not looking for 100%, we are
looking to pass and since they can only get a 1 (>75%), a 2 (50 - 75%) or a
fail (<50%), we will settle for a 2. A few students did very well and they
have been moved up to the top class where, hopefully, with the aid of a great
teacher and like-minded individuals around them, they will kick on
and do really well. For the rest this is probably as fair as they will go in
their journey in mathematics as higher maths is certainly beyond most. This is
a good thing though, there is no point in doing higher maths unless you really
like maths and have a good solid foundation as there is a huge workload to get
through in the space of a year. For many of my students it would be too big an
ask and since university is the goal for most of them they would be better off
picking 5 other Highers that they would enjoy more and at which they are better.
A good credit grade is almost essential to gaining university acceptance so I
hope they now focus and get on with the job in hand. January is the month for
the fourth year’s parent teacher evening and was a great opportunity to pass on
this message. Armed with such strong statistics it would be easy to paint a
pessimistic outlook for the majority of students but what would be the benefit
of that? The message was simple: very little work has been done so far and
there was a lot of instability last year but that is in the past,
time to knuckle down and get on with the job. Everyone took this on board, we
agreed strategies to help their sons and daughters and hopefully this
will produce results. One lady did think that a miracle was her son's preferred option
to hard work but eventually decided that it was not a good idea to bet on such
odds and even if he was due a miracle it would probably be wasted on his maths
exam!
It was my birthday this week and I turned 33. You would not
believe the joy it brought to my students to find out that their Irish maths
teacher turned 33! One young lady in first year could not stop laughing for
about five minutes. The class settled down, we started to work and then she
started laughing again. I asked her what was going on and she said with delight
”That means in May you will be 33 and a third!” This brought the house down
much to my amusement. All I can say is she is mathematically on the ball!
Onwards and upwards then...
