helen-louise's journal

I fear my livejournal entries might be very boring for a while. I am trying to acquire organisation so I have time to get my academic work done as well as teaching the kiddies. Unfortunately, I am starting from a position of almost zero organisation. Our house is disgustingly dirty, I am totally behind with family birthdays etc., and I have very few spoons. I also have a piece of coursework hanging over me that was due in on 15th January. Argh.

Anyway, I've made a list of my exams & the students' exams, and I'm trying to figure out when I'm going to take time off for my own revision. I've decided that I'm going to make my students book ALL their lessons as far in advance as possible so that we all know what's going on - at least up until June 8th, when my exams finish. That way, no one can whine that they were "expecting" to have more lessons in a given week (or at least, they'll get the whining out of the way early). Sounds like a plan? Sounds like a scary plan, though. I'm somewhat leery of booking an entire week off as "me time" because sod's law dictates that that will be when I go down with whatever disease is going to follow the current cold-thing... Oh, for a functioning immune system!

How flippin' stupid are some parents/guardians? My university course starts on Monday. Therefore, I do not know for certain whether I will be available to teach their kids on Saturday and Sunday, because I have to get myself ready for my own studying on Monday.

Apparently the fact my course doesn't start until Monday means that I should not have anything to do on Saturday or Sunday?! What universe do they live in? I may not be going away to live and study somewhere else, but I still have to sort things out!

I've also had to explain how I do not get half term from university, so while my students get a week or 10 days off in the middle of the term, for me it is the same as any other normal week. Therefore I will have the same amount of my own work to do as for any normal week, and cannot magically make more hours available. (This is why I suggested in August that Mr Two Hours A Day At His House should find himself another tutor, as I certainly can't do it. I'm basically only taking on new students who'll come to me.)

And the worst thing is that a lot of these people are themselves educated to university level and should remember what it's like. Bah.

ARGH will these students STOP with the pentavalent carbons already! I need to find a cat, plus the black trigonal bipyramidal atoms from my molecular modelling kit. I will make a molecule of the "carbon" with 5 bonds. And then I will place the cat by the pentavalent carbon and take a photo. The top caption should be OH NOES! TOO MANY BONDS, and the bottom caption should be NO MOAR PENTAVALENT CARBONS PLS.

...now I need a cat. One that isn't too special to eat the molecule. The pieces are pretty small and could easily be NOMed. Hmmm.

Anyone got a cat and a molecular modelling kit?

I have, at this moment in time, 13 freaking A-level chemistry papers to mark. You'd hope that this close to the exams, I'd just be ticking stuff or writing the odd small comment, but noooo, I still need to write copious notes about mistakes on them. Some of my students are also stupid and give me 4 exam papers all at once, which means they make exactly the same mistakes on all of them. I've been handing the later ones back unmarked and telling them to fix the problems themselves before I mark them.

Richard had some small, vile luminescent yellow stickers that he was using for paintball circuit boards, but he can't find them right now (except for the ones that are already printed). This is a shame, because I still need that "Carbon only has 4 bonds!" rubber stamp, and a vile yellow sticker would do. Especially for the horrible child who managed to give me two pentavalent C atoms and a univalent C on the same paper. And then tried to make the carbon of a C=O double bond chiral. Argh argh argh!

I am also enjoying retro computing in the form of Microsoft Word 97 and Kaleidagraph version 3.02. Installing them on my current computer was rather odd, especially as the Office install disc came with a free copy of Internet Exploder version 3; but they run like lightning. I may actually keep them installed after the project has finished.

Also, some parts of my life are not crap. They're actually rather good.

Hrm. So, I finally stopped procrastinating the marking I've been putting off for 2 hours. This post is not an attempt to procrastinate things further, but a genuine question to dyslexics and other teachers. How do you go about dealing with problems such as the following - a question on the Contact process for making sulphuric acid - where the student has blatantly misread the question so missed the point? The bold text in the question is how it appears on the exam paper, and the blue is her answer.

i) State the temperature used in this process. [1 mark]
440 °C

ii) State and explain the effect on the rate of reaction of using a higher temperature than you suggested in (i). [4 marks]
As the forward reaction is exothermic high temperatures favour the backwards reaction as it is endothermic & equilibriums seek to reverse change. therfore raising the temperature would decrease the yeild of SO₃(g) Equilibrium will move to the left.

iii) State, with a reason, the effect on the yield of sulphur trioxide of using a higher temperature than you suggested in (i). [2 marks]
Higher Pressure would increase the yeild as their are less moles on the products side so the equilibrium will move to the right.

I suspect that the exam board would give her 1/7 marks, though there's a possibility she may get the 2 marks for part (iii) for her answer to (ii). However, I don't want to bank on that, as even with those 2 marks, the student has thrown away marks by careless misreading. There must be some way I can teach her to take the time to read the questions carefully before starting?

But this gets onto another issue, which is that all of my students always have trouble reading for content. Dyslexia makes that worse, as does having English as an Additional Language, but even the native-born British students with no apparent disabilities seem to have reading difficulties. I think they panic about running out of time and rush their way through the paper, when they would do so much better reading it carefully before starting. Most of them also have trouble with the idea of active checking and the way the brain caches what it thinks is there, so will happily read out loud what they thought they wrote on the exam paper rather than what they've actually written.

( Read more... )

I really hate student juggling. Specifically, trying to fit multiple students + travel time into the 4 hours which are acceptable for teaching in an evening (4.30-8.30pm). I try to get 4 students a day, but if I have to travel a long way that gets cut down to 3.

Have a potential new student who lives within the area I take students from, but she lives a 40-50 minute round trip from me by bus. It's fine if I could fit her in on a day when I go to New Malden, as I'll already be there - but she's only free on the days I stay in Kingston. Argh! If she could come to me, it'd be fine - I could even take her home afterwards, as I have to get the same bus to exactly the same place for my next student. But her parent is being slightly unreasonable about that. I would have to go into a lot more detail to explain, and I'm too tired.

I'm almost at the point of saying I don't want the work because I can't see how I could fit the girl into my timetable, and I'm not even that booked up yet. This is probably a function of still being ill :/ Sigh.

Unsettling encounter with a student. He turned up wanting to have a lesson on a topic that only appears on the IB syllabus - it's not part of A-level. So it's not something I already had a set of notes or questions prepared for. Managed to find some questions in one of my books, but my printer/scanner/photocopier doesn't photocopy books very well. There's a corner shop about 5 minutes' walk away that has a proper photocopier, so I was going to run round there, except I didn't already have my boots on. He was still wearing shoes and volunteered to go instead of me.

I don't know exactly what happened, but a 10 minute round trip turned into half an hour (he admitted he'd somehow managed to go the wrong way, despite my clear instructions of "Go to the mini-roundabout & turn left - you'll see a wine shop, a bridal shop and the corner shop, called [name deleted]") and he came back in a foul mood without the photocopies. Apparently the way the photocopier was set up made it impossible for him to get the book to copy properly (also despite my clear instructions of how to do A3 to A4 reduction). But even though he couldn't get the copies, the guy who was working in the shop at the time still wanted 10p for the messed-up paper. This had made him angry.

He said "I'm not racist, but I hate these grasping Asian businessmen."

My response should have been "If you're not racist, why did you need to specifiy an ethnicity?"

It's a historical accident that the vast majority of corner shops in this country are run by Asians. It's to do with the way Britain went out and colonised parts of the Indian subcontinent, and the fact that when our "colonists" came to settle in the UK, they found that racist attitudes about the quality of their education prevented them from getting a lot of jobs. To pay their children's way through university, so the same arguments wouldn't be applied to the second generation, they took whichever niche work was available to them. In the 1950s and 60s, supermarkets were starting to push the traditional grocers, greengrocers and butchers out of business. But supermarkets tended to be available only in the very centres of large towns, and people who lived in smaller towns or villages, or who didn't have ready access to transport, couldn't always manage to get into the supermarket - especially if it was for one "emergency" item like milk. Hence the idea of a corner shop was a niche market for the Asian immigrants to take. The fact that the immigrants wanted to work as hard as possible so they could afford the best possible for their children meant that corner shops started to be open later than the old grocers and greengrocers they replaced, and as many of them were not Christian, they had no qualms about opening on Sundays. Nowadays, a large proportion of the corner shops on the outskirts of urban areas are run by people of various Asian origins - some of them even second- or third-generation British Asians. ( Read more... )

I am going crazy here.

As you know, I teach science. There are 3 possible options that students can sit for GCSE science at age 16: single science, double science and 3 separate sciences. Single & double are combined science which have aspects of biology, chemistry & physics. Most students do double science. The exams for all of these are next Wednesday, 7th June, in the afternoon. Every kid in the country, just about, will be sitting a science exam on that day, and I'm completely overworked right now with tutoring and group classes.

So, I'm trying to find out what the various double science syllabuses want the kids to know about white blood cells, disease, immunity and vaccination etc. There are 3 possible exam boards for these public exams, and each board offers at least 2 double science syllabuses to add severe overcomplication; but most of my kids are doing one of 2 syllabuses. Which theoretically should make things easier. Except, while AQA Co-ordinated specifies an entire page of content, going into a fair bit of detail about what's required, Edexcel B has all of 3 very vague lines. And I can't find a single exam question from an actual recent past exam on the topic. I can only find questions from books that are written to be roughly the same difficulty level, not actual past papers. This is despite there being 3 exam boards with 6 current syllabuses. I can find 3 separate science past paper questions on bacteria, disease and immunity coming out of my ears, but no double science ones. Am boggling, here.

I don't want to waste my time or theirs teaching them stuff they don't need a week before the exam, but why is it on the syllabus if they never ask about it?

( Some stuff featuring non work-safe words about cow reproduction. )

Somewhat to my surprise, having to start work at 9.30am three days in a row has not yet killed me. Several things have made the past few days bearable:
* On Tuesday, the student I was supposed to be teaching from 2-4pm decided she only wanted to do 2-3pm. So I got to go home early and HAVE A BATH and wash my hair before my 5pm student turned up. This was utter luxury, as I'd only got 3.5 hours sleep that night, and I was at the stage of tiredness where I felt insanely grubby.

* Yesterday, I had two longish breaks between classes - 3.30-4pm and 6-7pm. The first one let me have chocolate cake and a bit of work on a problem I was going to be doing with a student later on, and the second one let me go to Boots and buy a load of stuff I needed. I walked out of the door at work and got straight on a bus. Unfortunately, this serendipitous event used up all my bus karma for the day, and coming back I waited 20 minutes while 4 buses went past in the opposite direction, but never mind.

* I've been getting a lift into work with my dad every morning. This necessitates dealing with my dad first thing in the morning, which is stressful, but still more pleasant than having to deal with buses first thing in the morning. This also means I can get up at 8.30 and leave the house at 9, rather than having to get up at 8 and leave the house at 8.30. An extra half hour of sleep is more civilised for all concerned.

* The pleasant student who wants to learn to obnoxious little brat ratio has been something like 10:1, and even the obnoxious brat isn't that bad when given challenging-enough work. It seems that all my current students are there because they want to be, either because they know they're having trouble with the subject or because they genuinely enjoy it and want to learn more than they do at school. This is a good thing. The hardest kids to deal with are always the ones who are there solely because their parents want them to be.

And today, I have the afternoon off, with absolutely nothing to do. So I'm going to type in all my ideas for the Work In Progress until it drives me nuts, and then do something relaxing like READ A BOOK (one that comes on paper, I mean). It's been far too long (at least a couple of weeks!) since I had enough free time to read a complete book in one go, and I got a lot of books for Christmas. So. Literature. The way forward :)