Year 11 - 2024/2025: Heading down the home straight towards that finish line!

[QueenMabby]

Next thread. 10 days of exams to go. Looks like we’re all heading into a busy week this week - good luck!

Re @frozendaisy‘s three goats…..🐐 I just got a photo on our village WhatsApp…! ….drama again!….. sheep are on the loose on the lane and heading right towards mine……..🤔🤔🤔…. not much I wouldn’t do for a pass for DS!! 🙄!

GOOD LUCK 🍀!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Good luck to everyone doing maths – for the vast majority of our DC, this will be the last time in their entire lives that they ever sit a maths test!

@frozendaisyVector Victor 😂. I'm sacrificing to Sally Circle Theorem and maybe a quick prayer to Queenie Quadratic too. Oh bless them!

No more maths for DD after this. She's sad but I think A level will be a bit beyond her even though she likes Maths (a lot to do with the teacher).

@clary
Is nid de poule on the vocab list ? If it isn’t, what’s the idea behind this ? How many words or phases that are not on the vocab list should we expect. That would really play into the hands of the native speakers. Or are they expecting you to be able to guess it from the context.
Thank you as always.

On the music @VioletIndigoBlueGreen and @OhCrumbsWhereNow - i don't really understand why schools are picking this board. My other dd did the WJEC music, which did seem a bit more accessible.

She got a 7 with next to no teaching, some ropey performance recording because no-one at her school was able to play the piano properly and a bit of native wit. She's not a natural musician and we couldn't help her. In contrast, I feel the Edexcel one is picked by schools with very high achieving musical cohorts, which seems a bit unfair and skewed.

DD2 has a couple of grade 8 distinctions in woodwind (and is about to take the same in singing), plays a string instrument and piano to grade 5 ish and obviously has grade 5 theory. She also spends half her life in orchestra and still finds appraising really tough. Friends of hers who were in NCO etc are finding it hard to get a 7 on the listening paper, because essay writing is not their thing. Seems absurd and inaccessible.

Her school does two different boards, incidentally - Edexcel for those who take in year 11 (if you join the school late as a musician basically) and something else for those who take in Year 9 and then do the school's own certificate for two years. Apparently the Edexcel is a better progress to A-Level but that's not really much help for those who aren't planning to do it!

Yes in the half term DS asked what day they were going back to school and what exam did he have on Friday…

I was hoping he’d follow my experience of last minute cramming - it served me very well. Must be now my brain works. But alas, he didn’t appear to even do that. So now I’m just hoping he has done enough at school…

There wasn't a great deal of respect for Victor Vector in this household this morning. It was more a case of "after today I will never have to look at maths again".

I sent another email informing school he's leaving after the exam - illegal study leave.

I hope it goes better for your DD than she fears. My DD is the same – numerate but just panics at the more complex stuff. I just want this morning to be over for her and she'll never have to take a maths test again.

Thanks @claryYes I should have specified AQA Higher writing.

As we're such an involved bunch, maybe we need to go Reddit style with a different thread for each exam!

Good luck to all the DC today. Hope the nerves are holding out for them and the paper is kind. After a v hard and disappointing paper 1, DS knows he has to push his average up to secure a 5, hope for a 6.

Good luck with Maths to everyone! 🍀

@SilverSnaffles I understand the panic feeling well. Hope your DD is feeling calmer now. I suspect DD has a hidden dyslexia/dyscalculia thing going on. She actually likes Maths and is hoping to do it at A level. But she is prone to transposing numbers/letters when reading them and moving marks from left to right in operations. She has enough to worry yso we haven't investigated it further.

@SuperTrooper14 I am quite hands off with DD when it comes to revision. She needs a lot of hand holding with everyday stuff, mostly organising any non-routine event or activity and masses of talking down, up and preventing meltdowns and panic attacks. However, she is very independent in general. For study and revision she wants to be left well alone. I had a similar enraged reaction from her this morning when I suggested she checked her calculator and all Maths instruments were in her bag.

Just wondering, what are the chances of the 25th (contingency day) will be needed at this stage?

We're going away for a few days to visit family but we're still planning to be back on the 24/5th just in case. Are we being unnecessarily cautious?

I pointed out to DD this am that hopefully she'll never have to do maths again.....then she said but I still have chemistry and physics to go so we dropped the subject! Hope they're all looking at the paper now and thinking that it's ok

Ratty has his 6th form (first choice) college introduction day on 25th, they know it's contingency day but said it's rarely used and will regroup something different if needed.
So I from that I think it's very unlikely.

I don't think it's ever been used, has it?

Thank you @SuperTrooper14. I hope it goes ok for your dd. I suppose my dd will never have to take a Maths test again after today, potentially.

That said, yesterday she was talking about accosting the head of sixth form on results day if she doesn’t get the required level 5. They are also Head of English and dd is one of their best performing English pupils, so she’s praying he will let her in with a Maths resit as the condition. As far as I know, they have previously only done this for pupils that had a clear-cut reason for special consideration, but if that thought gets dd through to results day without completely cracking up, so be it.

If by some miracle they do agree, we will have to find the money for private tutoring and potentially a private dyscalculia assessment. No idea how though, as last time I checked the assessment was a couple of thousand pounds locally. So frustrating, as a year ago we could have done it, but dh was made redundant in the middle of our major house renovation (that we waited almost 20 years to have done) so we are literally cleaned out savings-wise and having to manage on half his previous salary as well.

What are people doing that never needs maths again?

DS1 is on a college course with regular maths tests and DS2 also planning a course that needs maths. Not A Level maths but a working knowledge is needed for a lot of careers.

The main thing I think is never ever having to do such a vast array of different subjects at the same time (and being judged on stuff you learned 3 years ago) under such pressured conditions.

@Cobwebs5 this was OCR and it was in 2017 but I assume it was on the list, There were some tough words on that spec. I once took a past paper to show my HoD whose mum was French and he didn’t know one word, tho we both worked it out from context.

OCR didn’t choose to do MFL under the new spec which is one reason why most schools now do AQA. DD’s OCR paper a lot harder than AQA which my school did.

Any words not on the list should be given. Dd most indignant to be told requin was shark as she knew that!

@stickygotstuck dd1was the same. Consistently reversed and transposed numbers throughout primary school, but apparently, somehow, passed the screening they did. Eventually the head of Maths literally drilled them, making them go over, highlight and correct every time and bizarrely that worked. Head of Maths insisted it was explained by the Maths lessons they missed when they were seriously ill in Reception/Y1 and thought it would be fine going forward, as they were clearly numerate. They scraped a 4, but didn’t actually have to sit the exam, as it was the first year of the pandemic.

@SilverSnaffles that sounds very expensive for dyscalculia? We went private for DD's ADHD assessment and that was £650 (not that it was really in any doubt - I had a file of evidence, a genogram that was a geneticist's dream, and it had been glaringly obvious since she was 5 😂)

Would 6th form do the testing via an Ed Psych for you?

Just looking on google: https://www.dyslexiawimbledon.co.uk/

Really?

I keep hearing what lovely long summer we are supposed to be having, but between contingency day, interviews, induction days and a hospital appointment at the end of July (which we've been praying for for 2 years and of course, it has to come now) we are very limited on dates to do stuff we'd like.

I think we all need maths, but we don't all need to sit maths tests!

DS2 plans to do history, eng lang and another A level which def won't be science or maths based. He doesn't know what he wants to do long term.

Hope it is all going well for those Maths peeps. We're maths iGCSE so no exam today, but he's begrudgingly gone in for a music revision morning. He's put off thinking about music so it will do him good, even if he doesn't agree. He took music because we thought it would be a relatively 'easy win' because he was already a proficient musician (not as proficient as some of those on here, but sufficiently proficient - grade 6/7 level instrument and grade 5 theory before the GCSE course started). But the composition he found a bit tricky and appraisal he finds incredibly hard - yes - we're Edexcel too. I'm not sure he'd have got a higher grade from the other options that were available, but its not turned out to be the 'easy win' we'd hoped for.

@EarthlyNightshade, dd is doing Drama, English Lang//Lit, Sociology and Politics. Unless she doesn’t get a 5 in Maths, then she will be doing Drama/Acting at her back-up college and potentially English A level if she can arrange it.

Dd1 (whose study has been delayed due to health issues) is just about to start an access course towards a Social Studies degree with a view to future employment in an charity/advocacy role.

Any Maths involved is likely to be more about statistics, than more complex Maths, which we all seem perfectly capable of. I used to be in charge of retention and achievement stats/spreadsheets at a large FE college with no problems at all, just don’t ask me to do circle theorem etc.

Ds1 scraped a 4, but flew through the maths in the foundation year of his computing degree and has been fine with the maths in his first year as well.

I think, rather than never having to do any Maths at all again, it’s about never having to sit another dedicated Maths exam, iyswim.

@OhCrumbsWhereNow I doubt Sixth Form will do it, as school refused and said we had to go private. Sadly I think funds are so tight these days that schools resist paying for assessment/intervention for most pupils.

Dd’s friend has pretty severe dyscalculia and school refused, so her parents had to go private. Luckily they can afford it. The assessment showed she was at the very severe end of the scale, so how school managed to justify not arranging an assessment is beyond me. Not to mention how she got to Y11 before it was picked up by her Maths teachers.!

I am going to do some more research around it between now and results day though. Just in case.

I will also have to try and get Sixth Form to agree to laptop use as dd’s normal way of working, as she’s been in agony with her wrists and hands and not managed to finish some papers due to the pain. So that may mean paying for OT to assess her hypermobility and handwriting. I may be able to get that on the NHS via community services, but it will depend on the length of waiting lists.

I can see I am going to have to dig out my ‘that parent’ persona and start butt kicking again, just when I thought I had got them all through the worst bit and could stand down, at least a little bit!