Primary school maths: A vicious circle (from TODAY May 8)

[Intermezzo]

oxyleo:

Gee Intermezzo. Your Commercial Break outshone my Two Worded cuteness. :please:


Pray tell us where u got those questions and attempted answers from, lest we are led to suspect they were thrown at Kindergarten children. The last one was attempted with wild creativity, which we mostly expect of children that age. Hee hee!

Gasp! You're not with MOE! You're with MCYS! :scared:

Hahaha! Sorry, having my own comic relief here.

hi oxyleo ~ glad u enjoyed that
i saw them on the blog of Lim Jeck :
http://www.limjeck.com/index.jsp

kekeke not sure about the MCYS joke.. :skeptical:
but can't be anything good to be associated with any ministry, so.... :spank:

[daisyt]

august24:

My friend's DD failed her Maths for P5 CA1 and SA1. She is very upset and disappointed with her DD, though she knew DD's whole class failed! Her DD is very remoseful and blamed the failure on herself being lazy, which I do not think so. She wrote to apologise and mentioned that she does not wish for more tuition as it is very tiring. She is already getting tuition for Math but it does not help. She was good at Math in lower primary so my friend was upset... what went wrong?

I personally feel that is whole class failed and her dd also failed, then there is nothing to feel upset about. Your friend should ask the teacher, whats wrong with the paper that whole class failed? Is it the paper is set too high standard or stricter marking or the whole class standard is really so low or the teacher did not teach well?

I pity the poor girl, at 10 years old, need to write to aplolgize for failing maths and feel remorseful. Come on, she is only 10... Still a long way in life to learn about failure. :sad:

[Pris.011283tang]

daisyt:

august24:

My friend's DD failed her Maths for P5 CA1 and SA1. She is very upset and disappointed with her DD, though she knew DD's whole class failed! Her DD is very remoseful and blamed the failure on herself being lazy, which I do not think so. She wrote to apologise and mentioned that she does not wish for more tuition as it is very tiring. She is already getting tuition for Math but it does not help. She was good at Math in lower primary so my friend was upset... what went wrong?

I personally feel that is whole class failed and her dd also failed, then there is nothing to feel upset about. Your friend should ask the teacher, whats wrong with the paper that whole class failed? Is it the paper is set too high standard or stricter marking or the whole class standard is really so low or the teacher did not teach well?

I pity the poor girl, at 10 years old, need to write to aplolgize for failing maths and feel remorseful. Come on, she is only 10... Still a long way in life to learn about failure. :sad:

Actually a slide in result is expected from pri 4 to 5 my ds also did very badly for ca1 and i was told by his teachers a slide is expected thus because of ca1 sa also got pulled down.

If whole class failed asked the teacher was the paper too tough? or were the kids not prep enough?

To write a letter of apology to the mum for failing can guess she must be feeling very hurt inside and afraid of added tution because that will be added stress.

[oxyleo]

Intermezzo:

oxyleo:

Gee Intermezzo. Your Commercial Break outshone my Two Worded cuteness. :please:


Pray tell us where u got those questions and attempted answers from, lest we are led to suspect they were thrown at Kindergarten children. The last one was attempted with wild creativity, which we mostly expect of children that age. Hee hee!

Gasp! You're not with MOE! You're with MCYS! :scared:

Hahaha! Sorry, having my own comic relief here.

hi oxyleo ~ glad u enjoyed that
i saw them on the blog of Lim Jeck :
http://www.limjeck.com/index.jsp

kekeke not sure about the MCYS joke.. :skeptical:
but can't be anything good to be associated with any ministry, so.... :spank:

:boogie: 有话好好讲。君子动口不动手。 :imanangel:

[tutormum]

daisyt:

august24:

My friend's DD failed her Maths for P5 CA1 and SA1. She is very upset and disappointed with her DD, though she knew DD's whole class failed! Her DD is very remoseful and blamed the failure on herself being lazy, which I do not think so. She wrote to apologise and mentioned that she does not wish for more tuition as it is very tiring. She is already getting tuition for Math but it does not help. She was good at Math in lower primary so my friend was upset... what went wrong?

I personally feel that is whole class failed and her dd also failed, then there is nothing to feel upset about. Your friend should ask the teacher, whats wrong with the paper that whole class failed? Is it the paper is set too high standard or stricter marking or the whole class standard is really so low or the teacher did not teach well?

I pity the poor girl, at 10 years old, need to write to aplolgize for failing maths and feel remorseful. Come on, she is only 10... Still a long way in life to learn about failure. :sad:

I agree if the whole class failed, it's probably not her fault. There's many possibilities and your friend should find out the truth. The girl sounds very sensible and mature to write letter to apologise. My DS will not do such a thing but :oops: :oops: try to :hugs: :hugs: when they do something wrong. Since she has a tutor, let her tutor go through the papers with her. I always go through exam papers with my students even though their teacher has gone through with them. I always insist on doing so to make sure that they understand the concepts and realise what their mistakes were. Their subject teachers will not be able to do that cos they would only give the standard answers and the student will not know why his/her weakness. At this time, the girl needs encouragement more than anything else. Sometimes, it's better that we don't focus on a failure but give encouragement instead. From my experience, students will be very :sad: and :oops: with their results already. They would even refused to show me their exam papers if they felt that they didn't do as well as they have expected. Once they realised that going through their papers is not to :stompfeet: :mad: :rant: but to help them, my students are always very eager to show me their papers. DS3 failed his CA1 E. Maths. I don't :stompfeet: :rant: :mad: cos it won't change anything. His reason was that the whole paper was based on 20 marks with only a handful of questions with some 5-mark question or something like that. He made a careless mistake for a 5 mark question in the beginning (so first part wrong means wrong answer for the whole question). He got 9/20 for that paper. Similar, one of his classmates scored 20/20 which translated into 100/100. I don't think it's fair to convert 20 marks to a total of 100% to reflect the whole term performance. He also failed English for CA1 and his English is very powderful compared to his classmates. Still no :stompfeet: :rant: :mad: Just :scratchhead: Well, for SA1, he got A2 for English. From D7 to A2, that's so impressive that I jokingly told him that he should paste his CA1 and SA1 results on the wall of the tuition centre to show how tuition helped to improve his grades. :razz:

[CoffeeCat]

august24:

My friend's DD failed her Maths for P5 CA1 and SA1. She is very upset and disappointed with her DD, though she knew DD's whole class failed! Her DD is very remoseful and blamed the failure on herself being lazy, which I do not think so. She wrote to apologise and mentioned that she does not wish for more tuition as it is very tiring. She is already getting tuition for Math but it does not help. She was good at Math in lower primary so my friend was upset... what went wrong?

It is important to find out where the marks are lost. Recently I have a thought as to whether it is possible that p5 papers are comparable to p6 papers in terms of difficulty, in the sense of the proportion of challenging word problems. :scratchhead: If in that case, then parents and students shouldn't panick too much or get affected with unnecessary negative thoughts..

[Intermezzo]

oxyleo:

:boogie: 有话好好讲。君子动口不动手。 :imanangel:

噢凯。多谢教诲 ~

[Chenonceau]

tutormum:

I agree if the whole class failed, it's probably not her fault. There's many possibilities and your friend should find out the truth. The girl sounds very sensible and mature to write letter to apologise. My DS will not do such a thing but :oops: :oops: try to :hugs: :hugs: when they do something wrong. Since she has a tutor, let her tutor go through the papers with her. I always go through exam papers with my students even though their teacher has gone through with them. I always insist on doing so to make sure that they understand the concepts and realise what their mistakes were. Their subject teachers will not be able to do that cos they would only give the standard answers and the student will not know why his/her weakness. At this time, the girl needs encouragement more than anything else. Sometimes, it's better that we don't focus on a failure but give encouragement instead. From my experience, students will be very :sad: and :oops: with their results already. They would even refused to show me their exam papers if they felt that they didn't do as well as they have expected. Once they realised that going through their papers is not to :stompfeet: :mad: :rant: but to help them, my students are always very eager to show me their papers.

This method of failing kids hurts the conscientious ones most. My DS was also very sad and apologetic. He was so relieved when I declared very categorically that it was not his fault.

Kids who are tidak apa won't take it so badly. If I had insisted on blaming DS for the failure, he would sooner or later develop a tidak apa attitude just to protect himself from emotional pain. So I completely discredited those marks... said the exam was badly set... and told him not to care.

The odd thing now... is that I am teaching my son a tidak apa attitude. This is a value I never thought I would teach him. I've always taught him to care.

[oxyleo]

Intermezzo:

oxyleo:

:boogie: 有话好好讲。君子动口不动手。 :imanangel:

噢凯。多谢教诲 ~

不必那么客气。能够自我反省就好了。 :hugs:

[oxyleo]

Chenonceau:

tutormum:

I agree if the whole class failed, it's probably not her fault. There's many possibilities and your friend should find out the truth. The girl sounds very sensible and mature to write letter to apologise. My DS will not do such a thing but :oops: :oops: try to :hugs: :hugs: when they do something wrong. Since she has a tutor, let her tutor go through the papers with her. I always go through exam papers with my students even though their teacher has gone through with them. I always insist on doing so to make sure that they understand the concepts and realise what their mistakes were. Their subject teachers will not be able to do that cos they would only give the standard answers and the student will not know why his/her weakness. At this time, the girl needs encouragement more than anything else. Sometimes, it's better that we don't focus on a failure but give encouragement instead. From my experience, students will be very :sad: and :oops: with their results already. They would even refused to show me their exam papers if they felt that they didn't do as well as they have expected. Once they realised that going through their papers is not to :stompfeet: :mad: :rant: but to help them, my students are always very eager to show me their papers.

This method of failing kids hurts the conscientious ones most. My DS was also very sad and apologetic. He was so relieved when I declared very categorically that it was not his fault.

Kids who are tidak apa won't take it so badly. If I had insisted on blaming DS for the failure, he would sooner or later develop a tidak apa attitude just to protect himself from emotional pain. So I completely discredited those marks... said the exam was badly set... and told him not to care.

The odd thing now... is that I am teaching my son a tidak apa attitude. This is a value I never thought I would teach him. I've always taught him to care.

I agree Chen. Although it's still early days for my son, I've changed from my stance from \"Let's strive to do well!\" to \"Just do your best!\". We are now adopting a \"Prepared for the worst, Hoping for the best\" mentality. Like as if it's attempting warfare without ammunition, just a broken shield with bare hands.