3rd September 2020 15:24
By Blue Tutors
It would be an understatement to say that the last few months has been a testing time for education. Well, for ‘education’ read ‘everything and everyone in world’ apart from makers of face masks and hand sanitiser. The issue with education is that our young people won’t get the time they have missed back and have returned to school six months older than before and expected to begin studying at a higher level.
Whatever we think about how the government could have handled things better, schools have been great during the pandemic. They have adjusted quickly and many teachers say they’ve been no less busy than normal. And if you ask most students, they won’t moan too much about the lack of school; we can all remember those disaffected teenage years where we’d do anything to feel a little more adult and avoid being told what to do.
Our qualification system places an emphasis on the exams taken in May and June which allows two general routes to success. There are the consistent learners who focus in class and diligently work at home after school, taking time to understand homework, and start each new topic with a firm grasp of the last.
Our other type of learner is the crammer. The crammer is motivated by the end goal, the exam, and until the exam is imminent they will chat with their friends, play computer games and watch TV until they absolutely have to start revising. We shouldn’t criticise them too much; lots of crammers get great exam results, and it’s tactic which continues into working life. We all have the colleague who leaves work at 5pm with tomorrow morning’s presentation ready on their desk, but there’s also the colleague who arrives at 8:59 the next day wearing sunglasses, grasping a triple espresso and asks you if it’s obvious that they were up until 4am finishing their presentation.
Each year we receive myriad requests for cramming tuition over Easter and just before the exams. Parents ask for 40 hours over 2-3 weeks to help a student catch up with their consistent learning peers, and our tutors are often shocked by how little work some students have done throughout the year.
The GCSE and A Level exams were cancelled and as a result we didn’t receive those cramming requests. So many parents and students are clear that the exams are their primary motivation and once that motivation was removed they decided that a private tutor wasn’t needed. This would be fine if students were repeating last year, or if the exams cancelled were the last they ever had to do. However, the reality is that while the consistent learners have only missed three months of school, the crammers have a whole year of work to catch up on! The work they would usually have crammed into April and May.
This summer has been our busiest ever as parents and students realise the challenge of starting school again, but we’re really concerned with how the crammers will fare unless they act now to catch up on last year’s work. It’s worrying to think about the mountain a crammer will have to climb in April when they haven’t fully understood 18 months worth of work.