A's Coursework From HellA is a student who went to a fieldwork centre last summer after her AS-level exams and before starting the A2 course. She spent a few days cataloguing invertebrates in ponds. Then she was supposed to go away and write up what she'd discovered. She didn't. Hence April came around and her school asked everyone for their ( Read more... )

I fear my livejournal entries might be very boring for a while. I am trying to acquire organisation so I have time to get my academic work done as well as teaching the kiddies. Unfortunately, I am starting from a position of almost zero organisation. Our house is disgustingly dirty, I am totally behind with family birthdays etc., and I have very ( Read more... )

One of the things that's interesting about doing teaching and learning at the same time is that I get to experience the teacher-student interaction from both sides. Which is, y'know, obvious. But today I have been dealing with particularly bizarre questions and misunderstandings from my students, which has made me wonder whether any of my teachers ( Read more... )

How flippin' stupid are some parents/guardians? My university course starts on Monday. Therefore, I do not know for certain whether I will be available to teach their kids on Saturday and Sunday, because I have to get myself ready for my own studying on Monday ( Read more... )

This week has involved lots of Last Lessons Ever for my A2 students. In some cases this has been a cause for celebration, in others I've been rather sad to see them go. Lots of promises to keep in touch, but I know from past experience that only about 2/3 of them will even manage to tell me how they got on in their exams without prompting. This is ( Read more... )

ARGH will these students STOP with the pentavalent carbons already! I need to find a cat, plus the black trigonal bipyramidal atoms from my molecular modelling kit. I will make a molecule of the "carbon" with 5 bonds. And then I will place the cat by the pentavalent carbon and take a photo. The top caption should be OH NOES! TOO MANY BONDS, and the ( Read more... )

Today's "fantastic" exam paper answer of the day:
Question - State one large-scale use of sulphuric acid.Student's answer - "Soap ( Read more... )

I have, at this moment in time, 13 freaking A-level chemistry papers to mark. You'd hope that this close to the exams, I'd just be ticking stuff or writing the odd small comment, but noooo, I still need to write copious notes about mistakes on them. Some of my students are also stupid and give me 4 exam papers all at once, which means they make ( Read more... )

Am halfway through the huge stack of marking. 6 down, 7 to go. Discovered I really *do* need a rubber stamp which says "Carbon only has 4 bonds!!". I'm sick of writing that ( Read more... )

Hrm. So, I finally stopped procrastinating the marking I've been putting off for 2 hours. This post is not an attempt to procrastinate things further, but a genuine question to dyslexics and other teachers. How do you go about dealing with problems such as the following - a question on the Contact process for making sulphuric acid - where the ( Read more... )