not to dictate DS's GCSE coursework?

[conkertheworld]

We have a 15 year old. He is asking me to help him with a French task that will be part of his GCSE. I am pretty good at languages, including French. All he has to do is comment on a photo and he has ages (2 weeks) to prepare for an exam in which he will have to reproduce his learned work. I have several problems with this method but understand that this is what he has to work with.
I have spent the past hour trying to help him without just dictating what he should put. He got increasingly irate that I was being difficult and 'challenging him' instead of helping him and has now stormed off saying he will get someone else to give him the answers.

AIBU to stand my ground, or should I help him?

He should have everything he needs in his text book and work in his ex book. He won't have been asked to do this without a great deal of preparation. Ask him to show you what he has.

One thing is sure Google translate or similar will not do it for him satisfactorily. It always throws up mistranslations and rogue words he would never have met.

Yes I get the track changes thing now - I teach gcse French and was thinking that there was something really fundamental I'd missed all these years!

Totally agree with DieDeutschLehrerin but agree with the pp who also said that it's so annoying when you play by the rules knowing that lots of pupils across the country are essentially being allowed to cheat.

And with regard to coursework/controlled assessment - am I right in thinking it's being phased out over the next couple of years? I'm currently on mat leave so a bit out of the loop.

DieDeutsche how do I know which board he is doing? There is a pretty good website for the course assessments. We have a long history of me 'interfering' with his school (very successfully I might add) so I don't want to light the touch paper by him knowing I'm making enquiries.

And yes google translate is EVIL and it is so obvious when it has been used but pupils somehow don't seem to believe us when we say that.

If he doesn't believe you about google translate then show him this video:

Fresh Prince song in google translate

It's good fun but gets the point across and may relieve a bit of tension if you watch it together!

If it is AQA then it's written at the top left of his textbook that he'll use throughout the 2 year course, so he may have it with him at the moment.

Let him stew for a week and then help him.
MFL teaching and the present syllabuses both seem to be a total farce

As far as I can see the only way to win is cheat, language speaking parent, tutor, google translate. All are fair in getting a decent GCSE.

At least until the government puts real money into teaching MFL properly from primary level and by GCSE the DCs can actually use the language, it will remain a pointless box ticking exercise.

As NipNaps said, if it's AQA, it'll be on his textbook, if not, it may be on the copy of the task he's been given or somewhere in his exercise book/file there will probably be a summary of the course content, vocab list or something similar with it on.

If you have already had a statement of his exam entries, it would probably be on there. Also, on our school's Virtual Learning Environment (moodle or similar) there was an area all parents could access with info about their children, from attendance and behaviour to exam entries and coursework/homework completion. If you have access to a similar set up it might be there.

This is why Coursework is such a problem: schools bend the rules.

Oh, for dodgy super heads it's the gift that keeps giving.

Year 1: comb through the rules looking for inconsistencies that would make an F1 "Special Projects" engineer embarrassed at the small size of the loophole they intend to exploit.

Year 2: bludgeon the teachers in the to use this new approach, even though they tell you that it is both educationally unsound and will prove to be so obvious that it will be stopped anyway.

Year 3: Boast of the school's fantastic GCSE results

Year 4: Get all over the TV bleating that your pupils' lives have been blighted by the sudden action the exam board has had to take in order to close the loophole.

Year 5: make a sobbing mea culpa about how wrong this approach was, and get your SMT in over half-term to start re-reading the exam documents very carefully looking for a new set of loopholes.

If you want to see this cycle at work, has your children's school decided to alter the arrangements for November exams this year? Odd, isn't it, that changes to the league table rules should alter what is educationally best for individual pupils, wouldn't you say?

friday it's not just heads that are at it - I went to an INSET session with a chief examiner and the things they were suggesting were not just bending the rules but were blatant cheating. It was absolutely shocking. Some not so bad things like "use the verb tables in the dictionary" but others such as "maybe you could plan what your task could be in advance and then oops, accidentally wink wink all of your home works over the next 6 weeks can maybe match exactly to each of the bullet points. And because it's class work, you can correct it. And if it's in their exercise book then it definitely doesn't count as a draft of an exam piece. Because it's only at that exact moment that you say to the class that you are starting controlled assessment that the rules start to be put into place. So...if somehow they've already got a corrected paragraph for each bullet point that happens to be set then that's a lucky coincidence, isn't it?!"

We all sat there absolutely shocked. This was just before the lunch break and lots of people didn't come back after lunch.

My dp is a new mfl teacher and he is horrified at what he is expected to do. Basically, he writes their spoken assessment for them. The kids are totally spoon fed as much as possible just stopping short of the teachers actually sitting the exams for them. The reason is that now pay rises are target related so if the kids don't get the results, the teachers don't get their wonga. If that's not an incentive to cheat I don't know what is.

I can't get mine good results. My best kids are getting Bs at the absolute maximum. It's a test of memory, not of language and because we don't break the rules, we don't get top marks ever. I went to a training day and they suggested the homeworks of paragraphs done to match the CA. I don't do that, but I see it's probably the only way to get good marks. The sooner they get rid of this system the better

It's a stupid system but YABU: all educated mc parents write their DC's coursework. Your DS will be at a disadvantage if you do not. Sadly, french GCSE seems to have nothing to do with speaking the language so don't worry about your DS not wanting to make it creative and interesting.

Sorry to be s cynical and personally I would abolish coursework.

So I've looked on the school learning gateway but I can't find the task description, although they do have a clip of the questions they will be asked! Sorry, some questions that may be very like the ones they will be asked...

I've emailed his teacher to ask her what the examiners will be looking for and reiterated that we only want to support him, not do it for him.

What depresses me is that they come out of school with a GCSE in a MFL, and have less idea of how to communicate or read in a foreign language than I do; and I failed o'level French and German. No one even seems to be trying to help them actually learn the language.

I don't think it's particularly useful to take this as an opportunity to make broad statements which condemn and deride MFL teachers. The OP was a discussion about a GCSE task not the inadequacies of a teacher.

If you want to understand why some (though not all) teachers feel they must teach to the task in order to achieve as many high GCSE results as possible, despite its inadequacy as a strategy for teaching language skills, you only need look at the recent proliferation of threads on MN, expressing incredulity that teachers' pay should not be performance linked. Then add to this pressure from Ofsted, Senior Management, the LA, the media and their own expectations.

It upsets me to read sweeping statements condemning MFL teachers as disinterested and ineffective. It was and is not true of myself, my colleagues or those I trained with, all of whom strove to be dedicated and passionate practitioners. I have gained so much through learning German, and for what it's worth, my teachers did not cheat, my parents do not speak German and I did not receive private tuition. I did recieve inspirational and enthusiastic teaching and plenty of encouragement to follow my interests. I teach because I am passionate about being able to offer others those opportunities. I could not do it if I thought it was simply a box ticking exercise after which I took home some money. It would be a very depressing reason for being a teacher.

Unless you have been in my classroom or my department, or have met my students you cannot judge my professionalism, my ethics or my efficacy as a language teacher.

DieDeutschLehrerin Sadly your fine words are not what many of us experienced at school or what our DCs are experiencing now.

MFL teaching is very very patchy and the recruitment and retention of decent MFL teachers very difficult. Most parents can't help with language HW as we didn't have decent teachers either.

DDs had a very good temporary head of MFL, she left early for personal reasons. I think talking to DD2 we have some reasonable and one useless teacher at the moment. DD1 had a teacher who she said would have been good if the DDs had behaved.

And that is the problem the British really don't care much about learning anyone else's language (The Welsh only learn their own if forced by the manipulation of school funding).

Bloomin heck conker it's GCSE - "perhaps he wishes he could afford some cake" is a bit grammatically advanced for that level! I have a degree in French from Cambridge and I would not be 100% sure of nailing that construction No wonder he's pushing back a bit.

They key, to my mind, is not to think up English comments and then translate them, it's to look at the sort of expressions he has been taught and pick ones that apply best to the picture. Would be more along the lines of "the curtains are green". He is thirsty" I'd have thought.

Sorry if you thought I was complaining about MFL teachers. Actually I am complaining about the narrowness of the curriculum. And the way MFL is assessed at GCSE.

You are probably just too close to each other.

I struggle to teach or explain anything to my DS. He doesnt want to listen, argues, strops and we all get pissed off. However if my friend says EXACTLY the same thing to him, he is polite and attentive and motivated.

To be fair I am sure I was the same with my parents when I was young.