Theses weeks' objectives
- Review last week’s contents by going through the homework.
- Practice on the fundamentals of Math.
- Practice on the past years' papers.
- Sync up progress, look for more methods can be useful.
Background
- During the past few training sessions, student displayed good quality to follow instructions, but most of the times, can’t give correct feedback.
- Realised the student’s foundation is weak, he is not good at calculation, logic is weak.
- The reason could be lack of interest in the subject, and caused the weak result, and the weak result will produce less of confidence.
- PLSE exam syllabus was modified, many topics have been removed which may be a good news.
- Tutoring sessions were converted to fully online as of 22th July 2021 as Singapore returns to phase two for the restriction of COVID-19.
Procedure
- Carried on sessions in a combination of in-person and online due to COVID-19 regulations.
- During the in-person session, worked on workshop books and textbooks.
- During the online session, Mendaki workshop book was used, and with the help of Google meeting. The top reasons to choose Google meeting are it is free, can use whiteboards JAM to collaborate with the student. Also asked the student’s parent to send the homework before our online session to force him to work and try the questions.
- Reviewed the homework and discuss.
- Went through school topics and exam papers.
- Since the online session is more difficult than in-person, student may be distracted easily and ignored to interact. So I tried some methods to get his attention, like asked the student read out all the questions.
- Asked the student to try to answer questions even he didn’t know the exact result.
Session
All the training sessions lasted around 1.5 hours and 2 hours. They are hosted on Friday nights, or during the weekends' time if the Friday was busy.
If it was online, it will be using ZOOM or Google Meeting.
Feedback
The student is still not capable nor confident to pass the exam.
Time is precious since time left for the final exam is merely less than two months.
After study some of the past year paper and the syllabus, an estimation for the student to try all the questions is summarised like the following:
| Paper | Booklet | Item Type | Numer of questions |
Numer of marks per qustions |
Total marks |
Duration |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A | Multiple-choice | 10 | 1 | 10 | 1 h |
| Multiple-choice | 5 | 2 | 10 | |||
| B | Short-answer | 5 | 1 | 5 | ||
| Short-answer | 10 | 2 | 20 | |||
| 2 | Short-answer | 5 | 2 | 10 | 1 h 30 min | |
| Structured/ Long-anwer |
12 | 3, 4 or 5 | 45 | |||
| Total | 47 | - | 100 | 2 h 30 min |
Conclusion: From the above table, I will ask the student to try to score 1 mark in 1 minute for paper 1, and 1.6 minutes for paper 2. And for the correlation of number of questions and the marks, roughly 1 question in paper 1 and paper need to be finished around 2 minutes and 5 minutes respectively.
To-Do’s
- Look for more past year papers and delete the obsolete topics.
- Ask the parents to take more actions on educating the kid: check homework, accompany during tutoring sessions, encourage the kid, etc.
- Try on the past year papers by myself before the session so I’m more aware of how to organise the tutoring session.
