I have tried my absolute best in Maths but the GCSE level is stupidly hard. They make it harder every year. This isn’t fair for those of us that didn’t have much schooling and need it for further education. I cut a lot of my ‘friends’ off because they kept telling me not to aim high and to accept the little I can get in life. Maybe they were right. I may never be ‘smart enough’ to have a career. However, I am sure that those who are already in careers eg. Teaching, would also struggle with the Maths we’re having to do now. I’m not thick when it comes to Maths as I’ve learnt a lot that I didn’t previously learn at school in a short time. This Higher Maths is ridiculous though. It’s like they’ve put A level Maths into GCSE. I’ve heard the A Level Maths paper is impossible for even those that excel at Maths now. I swear they’re making it harder because they just want to make money out of the education system. I think that is morally wrong because those of us that are generally wanting to gain the education that we never was fortunate enough to get at school are stressed enough trying to catch up on what we missed at school.
I’ve got a GCSE Maths book from my school days. I looked through it and things were a lot easier. That is intermediate level. It was split differently in those days (early 00s). These are all the topics which we are still studying at GCSE level. I find the pace of the lessons too fast. I am fine when it’s a topic that I have figured out, however it’s one of those difficult parts then I am completely lost easily. I have mentioned it to the tutor tonight. We are supposed to do a lot of self study. I haven’t really done a lot this week apart from the homework that the tutor gave us. I am hoping to prove that I can do it in the 6 weeks probation period which I’ve been given by those that run the course. I have 4 weeks left to prove myself. I know that I can do it once I get my head around how to do it. It’s just getting to that point where I’ve worked out how to do the bits that I didn’t do at school or at functional skills level. It all takes hard work.
Tonight, the tutor was talking about carrying our ‘balloons’ around with us. This means the baggage of life which affects our studying. I carried around a lot of baggage while I was retaking my GCSE’s over the last few years. I think I did rather well. I’ve been told by many people that managing to pass with that much personal baggage is something that they couldn’t do. The way to do study with a lot of trauma from your life as baggage is to simply not think about anything but the task in front of you when you’re even in class or revising. Nothing but the piece of work in front of you matters at that time. You may be emotional over things that have happened in life, but you’ve just got to wait until you’re out of the classroom (or in the case of distance learning away from your revision session) to focus on all the other various crap that life throws up. It has been difficult when I’ve been emotional and wound up about things. But, I still managed to pass all my subjects so far (apart from Maths the first time around, but I passed the other 3 subjects).
Diary of a Painfully Shy Introvert Blog 