03 Apr Maths – Practise Like You Play!
This year, the maths department has decided to run early morning maths sessions to prepare students for their maths exams. After the success of the early morning writing sessions for English and for General Maths last year, we decided to extend our early morning sessions to Mathematical Methods and Specialist Mathematics!
Every second Friday morning, the students of year 12 maths subjects are completing past exam questions in HaMerkaz. Ms He (General Mathematics) and I (Mathematical Methods and Specialist Mathematics) are going to great lengths to ensure that the “vibe” of these sessions is as close to a real exam as possible.
- We hold the sessions in HaMerkaz – the venue for the real exams.
- We make sure the questions are exam-style or actual past exam questions.
- We give reading time and we allocate writing time based on VCAA timing.
- We enforce silence and walk up and down the rows.
- We permit only the materials students are allowed in exams.
Our goal is to give the students the feel of a real exam experience – we want students to walk into their end-of-year maths exams feeling like they’ve already done this plenty of times!
The feedback so far from students has been very positive, even though they have to get up early for it! We have found that some students are finishing questions early and some are not finishing in time. This is vital information! If students finish early, then they have time to look over their answers and they should be working on strategies for spotting mistakes. If students are not finishing in time, then they either need to speed up or strategically choose the order that they answer questions (something to think about during reading time).
When speaking to students about these sessions I have been making sports analogies – in my short time so far at Yavneh I have learned that football is very popular! In order for students to perform their best on “game day,” they need to practise. Every minute they spend practising maths is a minute that they are preparing for a game (an assessment). Doing these early morning exam sessions means that we are practising purposefully for the biggest game of all – the grand final (the end-of-year exams). Ms He and I encourage our students to take these exam sessions seriously, because, as coaches like to tell their players, “practise like you play, otherwise you’ll play like you practise!” The grand final is not won solely by the amount of effort put in during September, it is won by the amount of effort put in all year, in every practice session.
Morgan Levick
