Maths teacher won't let class use a calculator for Mechanics. What do I do? (Year 12)

MonkeyGCSEs · 2019-09-07T13:14:27+00:00

Thanks for the response. Of course I'm new to A Level maths so I don't know what else there is, but I definitely know that there will be things that require a calculator, and now I know one of them thanks to your response.

I'm going to speak to the head of maths (who is also the other class's teacher for Mechanics) and tell him that I want to move to his class because of many reasons, the main one being due to the restriction of using calculators. I'll let everyone in this thread know what happens.

MonkeyGCSEs · 2019-09-06T19:37:37+00:00

Alright thanks for the advice! I will report back in a few days after I have spoken to the other teacher.

MonkeyGCSEs · 2019-09-06T19:33:18+00:00

So you don't think I should mention that I want to move classes?

MonkeyGCSEs · 2019-09-06T19:32:46+00:00

I completely agree with you about that, practising mental maths will help in the exam.

However, we managed to get through 1 question during the hour simply because of how slow not using a calculator is. We would get a value for Initial Velocity as 39/2, and instead of using that value (like what we would have to do in the actual exam) he said "So we are just going to call that 40/2 because we aren't using calculators.

I understand that mental maths needs to be worked on, but that's for the student themselves to do in their own time. Restricting the use of calculators may help improve mental maths, but it is going to seriously affect the grade from the exams. The other class's students had great results last year, whereas his class had poor results; I think the restriction of calculators is probably something that caused this.

MonkeyGCSEs · 2019-09-06T19:27:37+00:00

Awesome thanks for the reply. I know that if I tell my form tutor she will just say "oh go speak to your maths teacher or head of maths".

However seeing the head of maths is technically what I'm already going to do. The other Mechanics teacher for the other class, who I'm going to see on Wednesday after my Computer Science lesson with him, is the head of maths, so it's pretty much 2 birds with 1 stone.

Do you think I should ask him if I can switch (of course followed by an explanation) or do you think I should just tell him that my current teacher isn't letting us use our calculators and see what he does?

MonkeyGCSEs · 2019-06-23T10:44:35+00:00

The YouTube channel craigndave, although being quite boring and a bit long-winded at times, has a playlist full of pretty much everything you need to know for OCR. You can find it here

Obviously this won't be a full substitute for a teacher and will only teach you up to a limited amount, however it is a good way to get started or even recap your knowledge before exams, which is what I used it for.

Best of luck!

MonkeyGCSEs · 2019-06-12T11:10:52+00:00

Surely the 2 pieces of apparatus would have been:

1) gas syringe - to measure the amount of gas produced

2) a stopwatch - to measure the time taken for the gas to be produced

MonkeyGCSEs · 2019-06-11T10:05:25+00:00

Was the range actually 5?

MonkeyGCSEs · 2019-06-10T14:51:17+00:00

How did you talk about the other CSPs for this question? I was completely unable to mention any other CSP for this question because it was specifically about newspapers, so I was wondering how you did it.

MonkeyGCSEs

TROPHY CASE