Week 9 - Lots to talk about

My grade 10 ML class wrote their second formal test for the term and I had set the test for the grade. It was much easier setting it the second time round, although it took 5 revisions to get to the final paper. I am proud of the paper as the teachers said it was a good paper.
We reviewed the test content the two days prior to the test and still there are learners getting below 50%. I felt like murdering them as they were not paying attention and thus lost out on a lot of marks in the test. Speaking to the teachers showed that it is the norm. There are some learners who do well and others who just does nothing. Their opinion seems to be that you can only do so much and that the rest is up to the learner.
There was one learner who skipped classes and when she was finally at school again and confronted, she said she was unaware that a test was written on that day. I was flabbergasted. Besides myself having personally reminded them about the test for the two weeks preceding it, I could not believe that she found nothing wrong with skipping school.

In covering Vat with the classes, I eventually got to a point where I asked the teachers help. My error was to not go to the most basic. I explained terminology, which they knew, why it was importent in their lives, etc.
When I got to the calculations, I realised that they understand and use direct proportion. I used an Ice Cream with Astro's example to visualise the calculations, which they got.
However, I kept the vat equation on top of the board and used the space below for calculations and that confused the daylights out of them. It turned out that I just had to write the actual calculation separately as the formula on the top confused them.
I never would have imagined that something so basic could confuse them so much.

On a positive note, I'm a lot better at marking answer papers and it is an extremely helpful tool to understand how the learners think. My conclusion is that I should have regular assessments.

I experimented today (Friday) with getting the grade 9 EMS classes to do an exercise while kahoot is waiting for them. When they realised that they can play a game after doing their work, they all worked. This also afforded me the opportunity to walk around and look at them doing the complete exercise as there was no procrastinating, once I checked 2 learner's work who were done. What I also noticed was that before I started kahoot, I reviewed the most common mistakes made and there were a lot of oooohs and aaaahs, as they remembered why they had made mistakes. It is evident that exam technique is something that the majority of learners lack. They get caught up in details and do not read thd question. The result is that they then lose marks unnecessarily. The teachers do however cover it in LO. I have decided that I will need to cover this in my classes when I'm teaching.

In the kahoot games, they said they did not know the answers, yet most of them got the answers correct 99% of the time. It seems they just lack a bit of confidence.