Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
For the past few months I've been doing some private tuition to try and make ends meet while I finish my PhD, and a recurring theme has emerged in the questions my students ask me - namely, one question in particular: do I have to know this for the exam?
There's one girl I'm teaching at the moment who's in Year 9 (that's 14 years old, for the benefit on non-Brits) who's particularly annoying on this front. She seems to have an almost phobic aversion to learning anything that's not garuanteed to come up in the exams she's got this summer. I mean, even if I teach her something that's at a very slightly higher level than what she's doing at school at the moment, it'll surely stand her in good stead next year, as the subjects I'm teaching (science and maths) are core subjects that she can't drop before taking her GCSEs anyway. She's even said to me things like (in so many words) "I don't have to understand this, I just have to know it, right?" :slanted: To be honest, it's hard to blame her, given the box-ticking, jumping-through-hoops approach that seems to dominate the National Curriculum at the moment, and the government's obsession with targets, league tables and easily quantifiable results.
I remember in my history GCSE (and this is going back 10 years) getting marked down for writing stuff that was, to quote the teacher, of A-level standard - because I wasn't simply doing what I was told for GCSE coursework.
Does anyone else here teach? Or maybe some of the younger members have recently finished school themselves? Thoughts, anyone?
There's one girl I'm teaching at the moment who's in Year 9 (that's 14 years old, for the benefit on non-Brits) who's particularly annoying on this front. She seems to have an almost phobic aversion to learning anything that's not garuanteed to come up in the exams she's got this summer. I mean, even if I teach her something that's at a very slightly higher level than what she's doing at school at the moment, it'll surely stand her in good stead next year, as the subjects I'm teaching (science and maths) are core subjects that she can't drop before taking her GCSEs anyway. She's even said to me things like (in so many words) "I don't have to understand this, I just have to know it, right?" :slanted: To be honest, it's hard to blame her, given the box-ticking, jumping-through-hoops approach that seems to dominate the National Curriculum at the moment, and the government's obsession with targets, league tables and easily quantifiable results.
I remember in my history GCSE (and this is going back 10 years) getting marked down for writing stuff that was, to quote the teacher, of A-level standard - because I wasn't simply doing what I was told for GCSE coursework.
Does anyone else here teach? Or maybe some of the younger members have recently finished school themselves? Thoughts, anyone?