GCSE English Lit - Anthology - know all 18?

I would be contacting the department they should have told him about this already. There is often good stuff on BBC Bitesize that may help with structuring essays and some of my students swear by the CGP books

Sorry - clearly wrong there. Glad you got some good advice from people who have taught the board.

Yes, that's about right!

But I've never taught EDUQAS or examined it, (my experience is AQA/Edexcel/OCR) so my suggestions are pretty general.

Angelica will be able to be more specific .

Bands are how the examiners mark & are carefully NOT linked to grades - so 9 grades will be generated by marks awarded within 5 or 6 bands.

It's to ensure examiners carefully apply MS & don't just go 'yep, that looks like a grade 6...'

Then marks from different components are added up, the whole cohort are analysed & THEN grade boundaries are set.

So if marks are particularly higher or lower than expected, the number of students attaining different grades is still kept broadly consistent (or depending on your level of cynicism, manipulated to show whatever message the Govt wants to send out about education standards.)

OP

I teach Eduqas Lit and know it inside out. Please disregard the well-intentioned discussion of clusters as used by AQA etc. It is irrelevant to your DN.

He should have studied every one of the eighteen poems in class. Your OP implies that he hasn't. This is a serious cause for concern and needs addressing with his school.

Re: bands. The exam boards (and this applies to all of them) do not know the grade boundaries yet because they will be applied across the distribution of the whole cohort. 'Twas always thus but previously we had several years' worth of data to enable us to create informed grade boundaries. We are still required to report grades internally but we have very little to go on and the board will not give us much more guidance than the general bands. If his teachers have placed your DN at a 4/5 then he is working around a B in old money.

Two clusters is unusual...

I'm a GCSE Lit examiner.

Best advice I'd give is:

Have a broad working knowledge of each poem (eg a few quotes off by heart, overview of context, themes, language techniques & structure).

Have 2-3 poems you can absolutely nail.

If one of 'your' poems is the named one, happy days, compare it to another of the ones you know inside out.

If it isn't, do your best with that one, but look to shine with how you analyse the best fit one of 'your' poems.

Choose 'your' poems to cover a couple of bases. So if Relationships cluster, pick one romantic one & one about parent/child relationship, so you have ones you're super confident with for different focused questions.

Be very careful to focus on the question. Sometimes they are quite specific - 'How do poets use the structure of Manhunt & one other poem you have studied to explore how a relationship changes over time' - so start by highlighting the key words (structure /time) & make sure each paragraph of your essay makes a comparison about both structure & time!

PLAN. A quick bullet point list, mind map or double bubble then tick off the comparisons as you make them.

The edqas/wjec is meant to be the worst/hardest board because of this. Dunno if that's true at all. Dd assures me it is!

the AQA spec says this:

"Students will study one cluster of poems taken from the AQA poetry anthology, Poems Past and Present. There is a choice of two clusters, each containing 15 poems. The poems in each cluster are thematically linked and were written between 1789 and the present day.

The titles of the two clusters are:

Love and relationships
Power and conflict.
Students should study all 15 poems in their chosen cluster and be prepared to write about any of them in the examination."

and for the exam:
"Section B Poetry: students will answer one comparative question on one named poem printed on the paper and one other poem from their chosen anthology cluster."

DD says they study all the poems from one cluster (hers is conflict) they don't learn any by rote but must be able to quote, compare themes/structure/technique ... which means you end you knowing them pretty well.

(I'm getting her to check this again tomorrow because I'm worrying now!)

This revision book is meant to Ben good

www.amazon.co.uk/WJEC-Eduqas-GCSE-English-Literature/dp/019833284X/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_3?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=NZGE666929ZCECG5ZBDX&tag=mumsnetforum-21

Having just checked I may be wrong about clusters - that might be last year's spec. (Haven't taught Lit this year, only Lang.). The other stuff I said is correct though.

I think people need to clarify what to 'know' a poem means. It doesn't mean being able to recite it word for word. It means understanding the meaning, how author does this that or the other. A few key words from each to illustrate the points made in the answer.

Oh, ok. Yes, the Eduqas specification explicitly states that "learners must study all of the poems in the anthology".

And context info as well as a pp said.

We teach the eduqas spec. He needs to know ALL the poems from one cluster - either love or conflict are the most popular. He should know some quotes from as many as he can, should be confident on themes, ideas and techniques used and the effect they create. The exam will name and print one poem and he's expected to remember another to compare and contrast with it.

Trifle Eduqas don't use clusters. There is one anthology of 18 poems.

You need to tell us which exam board before we can help. Found this about AQA which says that "you must have a really good working knowledge of all the poems in your cluster" but your OP seems to say that he is studying more than one group of poems, which suggests it's not AQA

www.hoddereducation.co.uk/media/Documents/English/AQA-GCSE-English-Literature_Working-with-the-Poetry-Anthology-Unseens_Samples-Pages.pdf

WJEC has rebranded as Eduqas in England.

Your nephew has been misinformed. They don't need to memorise any poems in full but for EACH poem they need to know 3/4 quotations (with corresponding points about the poet's use of language) and 3/4 contextual points (e.g. Keats wrote 'To Autumn' in the knowledge that he was dying; 'The Manhunt' is written from the perspective of a real army wife whose husband suffers from PTSD after fighting in Bosnia and whom Simon Armitage met, etc).

Dd seems to be memorising them as has been told she needs to be able to write down quotes to back up her answers. She's bloody sick of English.

She will need to know all the poems from one 'cluster'. Although I don't teach that board, all the major exam boards are now required to meet the same standard, so closed book and students need to cover whole texts (in this case an anthology of poems). Learning two poems won't help her if the specified poem is one she hasn't learned.

She needs to find an online revision resource - there is loads out there - and swot up on meaning, themes, devices, context etc. for each poem.

Yes, some of dds books say eduqas and some say wjec....seem to be the same according to their website.

Ds hasn't learnt them by rote. Understands the structure, form, how author represents themes etc, but no need to learn by heart.

Check the spec on the exam board website.