Old and new challenges.

Wow, I hadn't realised it has been so long since my last entry. Where does the time go?

Ok, I've a lot to catch up on. The January class has just taken their Mock exams - results made grim reading. Only 2 students would have passed with grades A*-C if these were the real exams, out of 13 students in total. To be fair, a couple of others were "near misses" and will hopefully improve enough before the real event, but even so, I'm disappointed. I have much work to do and plenty of thinking is necessary to help the students through this.

In the meantime, I have still to complete the syllabus - we started "Radioactivity" today. This last topic should only take a week to complete and I tried asking the students to imagine we had discovered a new element, so what would they like to try to find out about it? This was something I have used before with great results. Students have surprised me with their inventiveness and creativity in the past. This time, the entire class sat with blank looks and couldn't come up with a single idea between them.

This seems to be so typical of the class. I've just not managed to enthuse them at all this year. They quickly gave up on the idea of making their own video to upload to YouTube, skipping lessons when they knew I was going to make them complete the task. They haven't enjoyed practical work, tolerate the IWB games and activities with bad grace, refuse to use Study Smart, our VLE which is full of video clips, animations and fun stuff for them to do (who wouldn't enjoy giving John Travolta an electric shock?) and generally show no interest in anything other than sleeping. I have just a few weeks left to turn this around, so I'll have to find something new and exciting pretty quickly.

Another new class I've been teaching since September is a Pre-GCSE class, which we've not offered before. This is an exciting challenge, not least because the students have arrived with a much lower level of English understanding than I was expecting. I'm having to learn how to teach this class as I go along, so it is demanding of my "spare" time. At least I had the forethought to borrow a copy of their English textbook so that I can see what they are studying each week in English. I'm trying to co-ordinate my Physics lessons to fit around the English learning every week.

This week, they were supposed to learn about natural disasters in English, so in Physics, we studied waves and how tsunamis form. I'm not sure how much the students really understood, but hopefully I will find out tomorrow - if they managed to do any of the homework I set. They seemed to enjoy the lesson anyway, which makes me optimistic. I've much more to say about this class, but it will have to wait until next time. Now, if only I could find out how to fit 30 hours of work into each 24 hour day...........