Resilience in action *cringe*

I am sat here on the last Friday morning of a 14 week long term. Although I am coming in next week to run some revision sessions, today definitely marks the end of an exhausting term!

Highlights of the term include Mashramani Festival, finishing the syllabus in iGCSE Geography and Chemistry with form 5, Phagwa Festival and fourth form’s progress in chemistry.

Last term, fourth form had 5 C grades, everyone else was failing. They weren’t prepared for the course. All of the concepts were new to them. They weren’t used to my ways of teaching and I didn’t know the students’ best ways of learning.

In terms of not being prepared; there was nothing I could do but I adapted the Form 3 scheme and taught it to the younger students to make sure they were aware of what was coming. Fourth Form are also my tutor group so I taught them about resilience. They held an assembly on resilience to the whole school and each of them prepared a speech about their own experiences of resilience. A few of them now count this as the most important skill you can have as a student.

To test this out, we started the unit of chemical calculations- the hardest one in the syllabus, full of new and abstract concepts (What the hell is a mole?!) and hard-right-or-wrong answers; no room for subjectivity. Assessment one- 24 fails, 1 C. It punched me in the face. Just as I was getting to know this group of students, an unforgiving unit on calculations makes a bridge between us.

I just wanted to move on, to leave this chapter and start the next topic. I roped in my brother who happened to be studying the topic at the same time. We recapped on the content and it felt a bit like Saving Private Ryan; don’t leave a soldier behind.

By the end of the term 12 out of 25 of them are passing chemistry. So clearly there are still some soldiers being left behind. I just hope they got the resilience message even if they missed the chemistry messages.

This is the Problem

I am after some solutions.

This week is the last week of school. It is supposed to be a week of extra-curricular activities and field trips. There have been none. Instead we teachers have filled our hours with filling in reports (on paper), filling in cumulative records for each student (same thing and on paper) and filling in a spreadsheet of results (electronically). Each student needs this done for them by each of their teachers. So if you teach 150 students (the average teacher does), 3 exams each, that is 1350 scores you have to input.

This time consuming task has created a culture of abstinence from school for the last week. Today 4 students from my class turned up. I do not blame them- they don’t get taught.

So what is the solution? Surely a paper-based system is out-dated. All of the teachers have computers, internet and the skills to type data into a spreadsheet. But I can’t think how this would link to the students getting a personalised report.

At my last school I had the use of SIMS. A school management software that did all of this. It was the bane of a teacher’s life but at least I only had to input the data once. The trouble is, SIMS (and other similar software) is very expensive.

Any ideas?