Month: April 2012

Imagine if the key-word in the Leaving Cert Physics syllabus was ‘wonder’

This is an image, courtesy of Wordle.net, of the current Leaving Certificate Physics syllabus. Wordle is a program that gives the most common words the largest font size:

This is a similar image of the proposed new syllabus.

Notice the new focus on the words ‘learners’ and ‘learning’.

Imagine if a syllabus had as its most common words the following:

Engage

Passion

Awe

Curiousity

Inspire

Un-nerve

Emotion

Story

Creativity

Wonder

If any of this was a priority then chances are that Particle Physics wouldn’t have been removed (and with it Pair Annihilation, Anti-matter, Neutrinos, Fundamental Forces, etc.).

Chances are that Cosmology would also feature strongly in the new syllabus (Black Holes, Quasars, Pulsars, Big Bang, Neutrinos (again), Dark Matter, Alien Life, etc. etc.). It doesn’t.

Maybe it’s just me.

Junior Cert Science – answering graph questions

Since this science course was first examined in 2006 graph questions have become quite common. If you know how to answer them they can be a source of very easy marks but if you’re not familiar with them you can similarly lose a lot of marks just by not knowing some simple rules. And remember there is no choice on the paper!

There are different types of graph questions and you have probably covered many of them in maths anyway. It’s just that the science textbooks don’t seem to do a very good job of telling us why we have them in the first place, or why there are different types.

The graphs you need to be familiar with:

  1. Distance-time graphs
  2. Velocity-time graphs
  3. Voltage-current graphs
  4. Force-extension graphs
  5. Cooling curves
  6. Solubility curves

As you can see these are almost all from the Physics section of the course, and unless you have practiced answering exam-questions they can seem rather intimidating. The link below is to a document which contains all recent exam questions on graphs at Higher Level and Ordinary Level and also includes the solutions. The nice thing is that once you’ve done one or two questions on a given graph they all tend to repeat after that.

There is lots of other advice on answering the graph question, but it’s all in the document itself.

Hope it’s useful!

Revision – Graphs

Assessment in Junior Cert Science – what a shambles; what a cod!

Here’s how to get 35% of your Junior Cert Science mark without having to learn any Science:

  1. Get the first 10% by having your lab book written up – it’s automatic and doesn’t necessarily mean you did any experiments. It certainly doesn’t mean you learnt anything; in fact if you missed out on any expeiments just copy them from somebody else and make up a date (try to ensure it was a day when the school was open).
    Technically we the teachers shuldn’t be signing off on this section unless we know it represents a fair reflection of the students’ actual work, but in practice this is rarely going to be the case. it may be that we see the results our students get as a reflection of our own teaching ability; we may have inherited the students from other teachers or indeed schools so may have no way of knowing how much of the previous work is legitimate; it may be a task too many for already busy teachers to monitor, particulary if the students themselves have little regard for the excercise or simply lack the necessary organisational skills to keep up to date themselves.
  2. Get the next 25% by having your two designated investiagations written up in the correct format. This isn’t very difficult and the average mark here is about 90%. The important thing to remember here is that it doesn’t matter how well you did the actual investigations or how clever your approach was (or indeed if you bothered to do the investigations yourself in  the first place) – all the marks here go for how you write it up.

If you think the final mark that students actually obtain may be somewhat inflated by the hoop-jumping above, you’re not alone. In fact some of us would go so far as to think it makes a mockery of the whole subject at this level.

Rules for National Schools

Rule 68

“Of all the parts of a school curriculum Religious Instruction is by far the most important, as its subject-matter, God’s honour and service, includes the proper use of all man’s faculties, and affords the most powerful inducements to their proper use. Religious Instruction is, therefore, a fundamental part of the school course, and a religious spirit should inform and vivify the whole work of the school.

The teacher should constantly inculcate the practice of charity, justice, truth, purity, patience, temperance, obedience to lawful authority, and all the other moral virtues. In this way he will fulfil the primary duty of an educator, the moulding to perfect form of his pupils’ character, habituating them to observe, in their relations with God and with their neighbour, the laws which God, both directly through the dictates of natural reason and through Revelation, and indirectly through the ordinance of lawful authority, imposes on mankind.”

See the full set of rules here.
Apparently these rules are under review.

Hmmmm . . . .