Yr 11 support thread - the scaffolding is holding up well

[pointythings]

Because we need a new thread now that things are really hotting up!

DD has German tomorrow too. I had similar problems testing her vocab, but at least it made her laugh at my crapness!

DS says English and geography went 'alright' which seems to be his standard answer now. I don't think I'll get any more detail out of him!

Day off tomorrow at least. Going to call him in sick and study at home.

Dear God, Ds has just told me he did his creative writing on CAT POO
His sense of humour clearly hasn't progressed since he was 6

I feel my purpose on this thread is purely to make the rest of you feel better. Arghhhhhhhh!
Over half way there now

The examiners will be delighted to have a change ........bet he gets an A

I bet at least 90% of the others will be stories about friendships across religious divides..............

Ready, was that for the Edexel q about pets! Dd's s anthology example was more visual than writing technique.

This from Twitter "The red-haired girl in Rosabel's hat shop was actually Sheila Birling: a conspiracy theory thread"

AQA paper was ok but incredibly dull. I would imagine better for 4/5/6 targets than 7/8/9, just hope there will richer language to analyse on paper 2.

DD said English was OK, she had a good time with the creative writing. Geography was hard but good, which is kind of what we want to hear from her.

Thanks Bertrand, I suppose it will make a change for them, time will tell.
Lizs it was wjec, no idea what the starting point was.
Sounds like your dd is aceing it pointy, not missing a beat is she?

My DS didn't like the AQA English : he lacks imagination and hated the picture. The Q4 was a bit off piste compared to the examples and I think any but the most able will have struggled with the statement. It doesn't fit with the 'established' statement type in the samples so I'm a bit despondent. DS can be a doom and gloom merchant but I think it ahs thrown him.

My conspiracy theory is that they have realised there is a lack of women on their lit spec so all they P1 language extracts are going to come form dull female writers.

Having rebelled and done Animal Farm with my year 11 class, I am cross at how much like AIC the passage was.

AIC?

Inspector Calls - sorry!

One of the Wjec starting points for creative writing was an unforgettable weekend. I think treading in cat poo qualifies nicely.

I agree with your DS Draylon

If he laughed, that's a good sign! It means he got it...

I'm still cross on behalf of all those who didn't do Inspector Calls though. Did this not occur to AQA??

My gdd year 10 doing an inspector calls and romeo and Juliet which she is really fed up with as she has read Macbeth several times and got well into it already and has started analysis of it.

AQA English was 'fine' according to DS. Which at this stage is 'fine' by me. He's much more stressed about computer science tomorrow which is one of his strongest subjects and wants to do for A Level. He's over-thinking it at the moment and imagining blowing the paper - which I just can't see happening as he has done shit loads of revision. Fingers crossed he'll relax once he opens the paper and realises all his hard work has paid off. His last exam is June 20th. God, this is torture.

Piggy do you think studying AIC would have been a big advantage when analysing the text in the AQA language paper? My DS did LotF (which he hated....). I wonder if the question-setters talk to each other at all! Even within the same paper there seems to be good/obvious (Macbeth) and wtf/obscure (Romeo and Juliet) questions for each of the books/plays. It's the luck of the draw - and yet they all get graded in the same way

I hope not café but if you look on Twitter there are certainly a lot of students who saw the connection. It won't have helped with 4 of the 5 Qs at all but may well have helped with the conceptualisation of the perspectives of Q4 which was a rather elusive question.

That said my DS (who did Inspector Calls) didn't see a connection until I pointed it out (which makes me a little worried!!)

I do wonder if some schools will query the exam board's decision.

Personally I liked the R and J question - and my DS wasn't all that keen on the Macbeth one, which just goes to show.

The AQA English paper was very fair and didn't contain any obvious stumbling blocks. The creative writing worth 40 marks out of a total 80 for the paper is where top students need to pull away from the pack.

Littleho
He actually picked the one about worrying re facing the teacher then the teacher bursts out laughing. Or something.
Totally lost re aic conversation, did this come up in language or were yours doing lit today?

Is anyone else's DC suffering some kind of post half-term slump? I feel that DS has not got back into the swing of things properly which is concerning! He seemed to be really making an effort before half-term, revised pretty effectively during the break but now that exams have started again is being really sluggish. His first exam after half-term was today's Eng Lit which was OK but I think the prospect of pretty much an exam a day from tomorrow until next Friday has deflated him.

"I'm still cross on behalf of all those who didn't do Inspector Calls though. Did this not occur to AQA??"
I don't think that people used the connection in the exam , did they? It's just a joke.