Mistakes

The two classes I taught today we not too bad.

In my Grade 8 class, I attempted to give them examples of how to solve the assignment that counts towards a percentage of their grade for this year.  I say attempted because, although I repeatedly said that it was exceptionally useful, very few students actually paid attention to what I was doing on the board and even fewer copied it into their exercise books.  If they end up failing those questions I think I'm going to write "I went over this on Tuesday" on all their exams...

I taught one of the Grade 11 classes that I work with how to give "proofs" for trigonometric equations, using the trigonometric identities.  This class depressed me somewhat.  Although in large letters at the top of the board it said sin^2(\theta)+cos^2(\theta)=1, almost nobody in the class managed to see how to convert the line sin^2(\theta)+2cos(\theta)sin(\theta)+cos^2(\theta) into the line 1+2cos(\theta)sin(\theta).  I could vaguely understand this but getting things such as (a+b)^2=2+a+b just make me want to cry.  Even the work that they did manage to do had to be literally spoon-fed to them almost word-by-word!


We had a short session for Grade 12 at the end of the day and covered similar work to what we did in Grade 11 earlier, to my eternal embarrassment I made a fairly large mistake on the revision sheet I gave them! To be fair they did not need as much spoon-feeding as the Grade 11s, yet they were still fairly poor.


Hopefully tomorrow will be better - I'm going to be marking the Grade 8 assignments and hopefully I will not get too depressed while marking them...


Apologies for the somewhat down-beat post, but the reality of how poorly-educated most of the students really are has started to sink in...


Better be off now - lessons to plan, dinner to eat.