Y11 2023-24 continued

[Techno56]

New thread for when the other one fills up, I need somewhere to panic away from my son 😁

Wait - aqa is not medicine tomorrow is it! I thought it was conflict and tension and period??

@Rumplestiltz ahhh sorry my mistake! It’s Edexcel he takes.

Phew. Mad check of timetable just then!

Well I've just been all around the bay of pigs, the Berlin wall, a thousand agreements with many different us presidents 😱 a novel in itself and all through space and arms races. No time to touch on Germany but she did well on that in the mocks.

I have to say I'm astounded at the depth of of the history and the finnickity endless dates of cold war.
She was absolutely solid, I just hope she can apply that to the questions.
Next week is 3 exams only, and then half term 🙏.
Just this three day slog ahead and then a weekend and a breather.

We have crime and punishment in history tomorrow. It’s very dull. I don’t think she is aqa. I’ve just had a horrible panic that maybe she revised for the wrong paper and will be having bad dreams all night - no reason for thinking this except my anxiety! It’s been a long evening !

Feeling like a shit parent. Sounds like lots of you have been helping with revision etc DS has been left to it as work has been busy did request dropping couple of hrs a week but got denied. Really need more hours in a day. English teacher finally marked an English paper 3rd time lucky had 2 others in still waiting to be marked. Told DS it was a 4 so he is panicking now. Think he has got feed up with it all as he is struggling to revise now they have actually started. Some teachers have been great others not with revision after school. Though they have stopped now exams have started. If exam in afternoon revision class in the morning then day before if morning. His first day he had exam morning 90 min revision class then afternoon exam. He missed English lit revision class as he was in an exam while it was on. He keeps looking on line fir answers to papers he has done instead of looking forward
Sorry that was long.

Snap!

@Shinyandnew1 oh phew! I have an injured dog I’m worrying about too who is following me around all day wondering where his walks have gone and why he can’t go
upstairs. Roll on half term!

Oooh just found this thread! Dd is so calm and saying the questions have all been stuff she’s practiced so far… I’m worried she’s over confident as mocks were very very mixed!

In English lit she was very excited by one of her answers and proud she came up with it herself… so basically wore lots of stuff she’s made up and not used stuff from lessons 🤦🏻‍♀️

I can’t wait for it to be over. She’s my first to sit GCSEs so it’s all very new. I’m dreading dtds doing it because one is bad enough!

@Newlease thank you for your wishes, hope your DD gets her 9! DS has been wandering around this evening muttering random historical dates and facts. The cat isn't impressed and been making her views known with increasingly loud yawn-miaows!

DS doesn't do history but has computer science tomorrow. DS's older brother warned him off history due to heavy content so I feel for yours on that front. No exams today.

@Tebheag I’m interested but not involved - ds is such a stubborn one we’ve not had any input to revision/study other than check it’s the correct day and he has enough money to buy lunch… The fact he’s sharing info about exams is a minor miracle

ha, me too! Have spent a fair amount of time discussing Germany, Versailles, Manchuria etc with DS the last few days...

@Pharos thank you I had helped at the start with Maths and English. I have taken over his weekly chores so he has extra time and listened to him when he has gone over the papers wishing he had put another answer down. He seemed more relaxed last night didn't hear him pacing around.
Good luck to all doing History and computer science today. DS says nearly 75% of his year are doing history. So his morning classes will be very small.

Another one here who isn’t very involved! Makes me feel slightly panicked, this thread…! History of medicine today, DD says this is her best topic (Weimar/Nazi Germany, American West and Anglo Saxons are the others…). She did maybe an hour of revision last night…

Good luck to our historians, computer scientists, psychology buffs and any others with exams today.

We are Team Psych (AQA). I am curious as to what view @GlomOfNit’s DH takes of the GCSE syllabus, much of which seems to me to say (roughly) “so-and-so came up with a theory 50 years ago without any/much empirical evidence so it’s more pseudoscience than science.” At least for Paper 1!

DD has six exams this week. She was due to start her periods in half term but they came on unexpectedly whilst she was at school on Monday, leading to a very stressed phone call from her, hoping it doesn't throw her off too much.

For those wondering about grade boundaries, there's a really interesting short podcast from AQA
https://www.aqa.org.uk/inside-exams-podcasts/episode-6

Good luck with history everyone. This was us 2 years ago but we had Vietnam, Elizabethan age, pirates and the American War of Independence. Fortunately Crime and Punishment was dropped as a post Covid concession. Even so, DC still had 3 full books to learn by heart.

Can we just say, he has to bite his tongue a lot!! He gets that this discipline is necessarily very simplified for GCSE level. An awful lot of it is indeed really dated now. Plus they teach Freud etc, and I'm not sure how far that's in terms of 'legacy' or history of psychology ...

I think it's fairly appalling that the syllabus isn't updated and parts of it represent what people thought in the 70's! So not much use if they want to go on and study at a further level - but if they do, they'll definitely be more up to date! DH says that Psych A Level isn't a requisite for the BSc because not everywhere does it, and that they will definitely be relearning, at a higher level, anything covered at GCSE!

Psychology today which is good subject for my dd. Tbh she seems much more chilled out this week than she has done during her mock exams and for the past few months. Hoping it's a good sign.

I wasn't aware (and feel daft for not knowing), but she told me last night that the grade boundaries aren't set until all the results are in, and it's likely they will be very high this year as people have been finding the exams easy .

Good luck to everyone! Today is a big day for DS, one subject he really loves (Hist) and desperately wants a 9 in, one he wants to do well in anyway (family honour! Psych) and they are both pretty intensive papers, I think.

His history syllabus terrifies me. I did GCSE Hist and loved it (must have been the only one in the room who really liked social and economic reforms 17th-19th centuries!) and while there was a lot of content, it was along one timeline as it were, and I suppose we organised it into themes along that timeline - Suffrage, poor laws, working conditions etc. Whereas nowadays, they have four different modules and not all of them interlinked - it's a big mental shift from one to another, I think.

Anyway, onwards! One way or another, I'm sure they'll all be glad to get this one under their belt and move forwards.

My son is so laid back he's horizontal but I'm pleased he's not stressed by the exams. He's found school hard work since day dot, academically, socially and emotionally so although I initially had high hopes that with a lot of work he could scrape a couple of 4s I have taken a massive step back and come to terms with the fact that he's likely to get 1s and possibly the odd 2. And that's ok. He has a place at college for the vocational course he wants to do and can start on Level 1 even if he gets Ungraded in everything.

His school is still running to timetable apart from revision classes taking place the day before or morning of each exam. So he is still doing work there. I asked what would happen once they get towards the end when they don't have many subjects left and was told that by then they'll have had a last day at school celebration and will only be going in for the exams, but the date of the last day would be given nearer the time to prevent any of them thinking they might as well leave now. So I've booked train tickets to take him away for a couple of weeks from the week after his last exam. Only now we've had an email to say there'll be a special assembly the Monday after the last exam. His exams finish on June 14th but a few of them are doing Further Maths which is the next week. So if it's the week after that then we'll be away and he'll miss it. Which I think would be a shame but he probably wouldn't care at all!

Good luck to everyone.

DD has periods from hell so has gone on the pill for the exams as if she had period pain on the day of an exam she would most likely be unable to sit it (vomiting, curled up in a ball on bathroom floor etc). Despite this, she’s actually got a slight period but thank goodness no pain at all! It was touch and go as she tried one pill in the autumn but it made her batshit crazy, she only started on this one at Easter and luckily it’s fine. Hope your dd is ok!

DS left for school saying 'this has been the longest week of my life, and it's only Wednesday'. I've realised I'd counted wrong and he has 7 this week, not 6. So once history is done this morning, he still has four crammed into Thursday and Friday: Maths, Physics practical, Chemistry and Geography. It's such a marathon. Good luck today, everyone.