It’s A-level results day. The usual debate is taking place in the media about the discrepancies in results. Why do young people in the south of the country do better than those who live, for example, in the northeast? This year there is the added conundrum of results in the last couple of years having been adjusted to reflect the fact that the students had not had a normal course of study with regular lessons because of covid and its aftereffects. Thus year they aim to get back to demanding “normal”.
It used to be a day when I went into college to help students deal with “clearing”, the system that matches students who have not achieved the grades for their fist choice of university to universities which still have places available on their courses. It was also a chance to see the students I had actually taught and witness their reaction to the (usually good) results they had achieved. That was the good side of giving up a day of my “holiday”.
There’s a lot being made of these exams being the first this year’s cohort have sat. Their GCSE results were based not on exams but on their teachers’ assessment of their ability in the subject. Looking back to my own experience I remember is having exams every year. Yes, they were set by our own teachers rather than being external assessments. But they were still taken very seriously, conducted under proper “exam conditions” and served the purpose of familiarising us with the idea of a formal exam system. Most of us took them largely in our stride. No need for counselling for us!
We have a group chat thing on Facebook Messenger, my daughter, Granddaughters One and Two and me. Earwigging on a chat between the younger members of the group I witnessed a conversation about Minecraft. Apparently the two youngest grandchildren (ages almost 7 and almost 4) were playing Minecraft on separate tablets in a cafe in h Manchester. The youngest was having difficulty “getting into” the his older sister’s “world” and once “in” was having difficulty locating her. Granddaughter Number Two had solved the problem yesterday aüt our house on our wifi but it wan’t working properly on the cafe wifi. Granddaughter’s One and Two got busy sending messages with instructions. Amazing!
Teleporting came into the mix as well as the characters were teleported across the world of Minecraft. And I was teleported back to IT training sessions when I was working as sixth form teacher. Those training sessions usually involved an “expert” giving us all instructions to carry out on the individual computers we were working on. When he rapidly reached instruction 8, I would be struggling to complete instruction 4. From then on I would fall further and further behind, my lack of understanding and skill augmented by my frustration and my increasingly bad mood.
I would have preferred a set of written instructions but that was frowned on. In the end I grasped enough to do what I needed to do. I even learnt how to use certain learning programmes in my lessons and got to know the vagaries of my digital language laboratory. But I never got into playing games, or at least nothing more complicated than shooting down asteroids. So reading the messages about Minecaft whizzing back and forth was rather liken witnessing people communicating in code or in a very complicated foreign language. In fact, I think I’ll just stick to complicated foreign languages.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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