Year 11 - 2024/2025: Half way, half baked, half term!

[QueenMabby]

Continuation of the year 11 support thread. Go!

Maybe it's the getting used to self directed study?
They are spoon fed somewhat at gcse.

DS has his leavers assembly after Eng Lang and then they do the shirt signing ,get hoodies ,yearbooks etc and then a big football game that a load of them have organised which sounds like carnage!

DS just home and didn’t sound confident about physics paper 1. The 6 point questions flummoxed him as he said some were “just the calculations” and he got his seconds and hours mixed up on the laptop charge question.

he said “don’t worry though mum. Lots of people found it hard which means the grade boundaries will be low this year” hmmmm we’ll see 😂

@DaisyDukesAuntie that's what DD2 said about the calculations as well - which board was this?

DD also said edexcel IGCSE higher physics was tricky but the whole year thought so.

Interesting conversation re triple or combined. Several students in DDs year who were taking triple higher dropped chemistry at Easter and are now just sitting physics & biology. Don’t think foundation was suggested as an option.

Half term here will involve a lot of Spanish, he hasn't even looked at his books since Oral Exam. So he needs to do that.
He will probably flop tomorrow after English Lang, that he is still avoiding any revision for.

He is out with friends on Saturday.

Sunday we will do a sweep of everything left and see where the gaps are, I am hoping that exam technique will be less required because we have recently do a whole heap of that but who knows.

So it is going to depend on what is needed which isn't known yet, but will make revising relaxing, drinking tea, talking, using online videos. After a week of study leave he is much more alert and focused in the mornings, like 8.30am ish starts, by midday you feel like you have covered loads. And actually I think we do. It's almost as though if he thinks the other option would have been rotting in bed but once you get to about now others are online gaming or it's just more usual to be not doing school stuff during this time that leaving it later is an uphill battle! Perhaps I don't know.

So that is the vague plan, get up early, do some work, get some fresh air around lunchtime, see what's left, attempt a second round of what is needed, give up let him game online in the evening.

He has the half of June, the whole of July and August off, he can work for another 3 weeks and a bit. It won't kill him!

@DaisyDukesAuntie All of dd’s friends got different answers for the laptop charging question. The Physics whizz of the class then explained it to them and none of them had got it right!

According to dd, it was set up to catch people out, as it contained figures they didn’t need to use it. I hate the way so many GCSE papers these days seem set up to catch pupils out, instead of just testing their knowledge.

That is what I would advise DD if we were doing it again.

Take Triple, but ignore two of them and focus on other subjects for Y10/11 and just sit the third one in Y11.

But that probably wouldn't look great for the poor teachers in the two I'd told her not to bother with.

Hence they need to come up with a sensible option for the non-STEM kids like they do with languages and humanities.

IIRC you can't do Higher Bio and Foundation Chem & Physics. They all have to be one or the other.

I guess to differentiate the 9s (given they exist) there has to be at least 1 extra tricky question per paper.

And to be fair, in real life, you do have to sort out what info you need to solve a problem.

(Though in general I do agree.)

Leaving DS tonight, Eng Lang was a strength in mocks so thinking rest might be better. He said physics (AQA separate/ higher) was ‘good’ but doesn’t feel certain how well he did. That is positive as not ‘bad’

Half term needs a good rest/ time with friends but then 12 more exams to prep up for, so will need to dig deep with the end in sight. School informed me today he has 3 morning interventions. Probably not a bad idea tbh to sub that in for home revision …

Best of luck everyone for Eng lang 🍀🍀

English language revision is NOT going well tonight. He is not engaging with those links I shared.
I don't want to be doing this but he has so many gaps it's necessary. He is also tired. I am tired.

Dd has said she'll do "some" English Language revision tonight...🤔

After an initial 'fine' I got a bit more out of DS about AQA physics (separate sciences).

He said he could see why people said it was maths heavy because there were 2 of the 3 six markers that were calculation-based rather than physics knowledge based.

He said that he's done quite a lot of past papers and he thought it was a little trickier than some other past papers. But all his friends said they thought it was pretty good which has confused and worried him - he's predicted a 9 whereas his friends are aiming for 6/7s. Had to do a bit of reassurance that it is all probably relative to one's expectations. Maybe he's used to papers where he knows how to answer pretty much everything and this time he came across a couple of questions where he had to think a bit, whereas they might have felt it was good because they could confidently answer over half of it. No idea if that is true but I said what I needed to say to make him feel better and stop him having a mid-GCSE crisis about choosing physics at A level - if he's going to head down that rabbithole then he needs to do it after the results have come in and not now!

Onwards to English Language tomorrow - not his strongest subject (very much a science/maths kid) and he's currently online gaming with some mates. But... cracking the whip doesn't work well with him so I suppose Ill have to trust that he's vaguely prepared 😖

I hadn’t realised that you couldn’t do foundation in one and higher in the others, I would have assumed you could as they are separate subjects. Also interesting about @NotDonna and the school letting them drop one, does that mean they will only have 8 GCSEs?

My DD is doing Foundation Biology and Chemistry and Higher Physics – her school are absolutely fine about them doing a mix.

Maybe it's just Combined that has to be all the same?

@Eccle80 8 is the average number of GCSEs in the UK I believe. You only actually need 5 including English and Maths to do most things. Oxbridge have happily taken kids with only 6 in total in recent years. It's more an issue if you narrow so much that there aren't the routes needed for A level.

This is exactly why our DD is doing a Level 3 BTech instead with our full backing. A-Levels are such a different beast to GCSEs. This way she can still get the UCAS points she needs for uni but via coursework instead of it all hinging on exams.

iirc
If doing combined it is all Higher or all Foundation.
If doing separate sciences you can do eg Foundation Chemistry but Higher Physics & Biology. if the school permits. However dropping a whole subject would lower revision load more than dropping to to Foundation which obviously caps at a 5.
So if a school considers it a workload issue, getting 7 & 7 may be considered 'better' than 5 & 5 & 5 for example.

It would make sense if Combined had to be the same level, because you couldn't really chop and change within a single paper.

DC said the Physics (iGCSE, Edexcel) was... "fine"

But I did manage to get a bit more detail out of them over dinner. It was harder than Chemistry and Biology, took them longer to complete and required more thinking. The calculations were fine. Couple of questions they had to revisit or were unsure whether there was a trick to catch them out.

@TeenToTwenties thanks, yes that definitely makes sense in terms of taking some of the workload pressure off and hopefully doing better in the others

I totally agree. My son (14) hates chemistry and physics, biology is passable. He loves computer science. He really enjoys history. He has to drop both of those because he is obliged to do triple science (as options) and a language (he is already doing RS because he loves philosophy and Art and Drama because he wants to be a film director). If he did double science as options and computer science, and he did History and R/S but not a language he would still get a broad education. It would just be the one he had chosen (and would do much better in).

We have had exactly the same argument with my DD. Hoping she has done some stuff. It is her most unpredictable subject 🤦‍♀️

DS has run out of steam - shame it’s such an important exam tomorrow. He took his English book upstairs but he’s currently in bed. He is at school all day though.

mine’s revising history rather than eng lang 🤷‍♀️
He’s planning on taking both for A level so I presume he knows what he’s doing.
I’ve suggested he takes the whole weekend off. He approved.