Mila
Honorary Master
How do you know that ?
-
Join the MyBroadband community
South Africa’s biggest forum. Discuss, discover, and connect with thousands of members.
-
Question of the Day: What is your non-negotiable item, device, or app for international travel?
1 in 6 matrics failed maths
- Thread starter ToxicBunny
- Start date
What's the goal with the marks? If someone can't manage more than 30% and we fail them every year because the pass mark is 50% what eventually happens to them? Do they get free schooling until they die? Or is the claim that we have many students who really want to pass and could get 50%, but they only get 30% because they can get away with it? Isn't the issue that there are problems elsewhere - poor quality teaching, poor facilities, and difficulties in the home environment? What the pass mark is is irrelevant.
Because the pass rate was less than 49%. Many people only just scraped through.
It concerns all the whining about reduced standards.
Mila
Honorary Master
you paint with broad strokes, and most people I know and most CVs I see people had passed way pass that level. They moered the living daylights out of you if you just thought of 60%.
http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page71619?oid=86908&sn=Detail
It was 59% for higher grade Which most people had all their subjects on and it was criminal to be "dumb enough to go to standard grade.
49% for standard grade.
39% for lower Grade,
techead
Honorary Master
why do you need maths? why do you need Matric?
we have a president without any qualifications, putting people equally unqualified into leading positions within government and corporate organisations.
monkey see, monkey do
a child that see's his parents smoking tik is unlikely to grow up thinking there is anything wrong with it? not so?
same principle here really, "why should I bother?" is the attitude adopted
and everyone acts surprised
we have a president without any qualifications, putting people equally unqualified into leading positions within government and corporate organisations.
monkey see, monkey do
a child that see's his parents smoking tik is unlikely to grow up thinking there is anything wrong with it? not so?
same principle here really, "why should I bother?" is the attitude adopted
and everyone acts surprised
You must have failed English too...or you are one of those Afrikaans people that never seem to be able to grasp the correct usage of the noun-verb agreement...:erm:
Also you make it sound like HIV positive people don't pay tax and there are no tax payers that are HIV positive...
Last edited:
Sl8er
Executive Member
There we go.
PapercutPrincess
Well-Known Member
This!
It saddens me when kids are given questions and don't know what to do because they are given the variables in a random order. They panic and say "I can't find the formula to work out what ____ is" but they have the equation and all relevant information needed to substitute into it to solve for the variable! Frustrating!
Though at the original post... That's shocking and scary :/
VioAdmin
Expert Member
You must have failed English too...or you are one of those Afrikaans people that never seem to be able to grasp the correct usage of the noun-verb agreement...:erm:
Also you make it sound like HIV positive people don't pay tax and there are no tax payers that are HIV positive...
lol +1 Million.
What exactly are you applauding?
I saw one thinly veiling insult and another inane comment showing he doesnt quite grasp the previous poster's broader point.
Last edited:
Not as hard as you imagine considering that a higher grade pass was 40%. That means that anyone who did not get a matric exemption potentially only scraped through and thus would have failed if the pass mark was 50%.
40% was a pass for higher grade going back at least to the late 70s. As for switching to standard grade it was normal practice for schools to move students to standard grade if they were not coping with higher grade in order ensure the student passed and the school didn't get a failure. I recall people struggling to get moved back because the school was worried they'd fail which would make the school look bad.
daveza
Honorary Master
Yup, but didn't you also have to pass one or two specific subjects otherwise you failed regardless of the overall % ?
ToxicBunny
Oi! Leave me out of this...
Yup....
The overall pass mark was 40%, but you had to pass specific subjects at 50% iirc... otherwise you would fail regardless of your overall aggregate.
The overall pass mark was 40%, but you had to pass specific subjects at 50% iirc... otherwise you would fail regardless of your overall aggregate.
I suspect many of these children start off at a disadvantage. How many of their parents read to them and taught them to solve problems from as early as possible? How many didn't because they can't read and have no experience in problem solving? It doesn't help if they also have poor teachers, a stressful home environment and nowhere they can easily study. The deficits build up over time and eventually there is no going back. Especially if there is no-one there to help.
I recall when I was at school the higher grade physics pupils solved problems with equations, the standard grade ones used geometry, drawing lines, angles and measuring with a ruler. Those guys could not understand how to do it with a formula. Things haven't changed as much as some people like to think.
Mila
Honorary Master
If you failed a language you failed the whole grade.
So if you did not pass HG the bumped you down to Sg then to lg.
Still saying people would not have made it is generalizing. More than 80% of my group were on HG. And one or two were on LG.
But whatever blows your hair back.
So if you did not pass HG the bumped you down to Sg then to lg.
Still saying people would not have made it is generalizing. More than 80% of my group were on HG. And one or two were on LG.
But whatever blows your hair back.
Sl8er
Executive Member
Exactly.
But apparently excuses produce results...because it worked so well on the rest of the continent -or elsewhere in the world, where this logic is/was applied, for that matter.
My 2 cents to the post. If you never allow the child to stand on his/her own don't expect them to stay standing when the mat is pulled out from under them (though it is an over exaggeration to this topic). My problem is that school tend to be left brained biased.
One thing I don't understand from school is they give you material from a young age to learn to study, yet they never teach you to study. Has mind mapping, mnemonics, SQ3R, how to overcome memory blocks and simply how to study for left brain and right brain. It has never been taught as a fully-fledged subject (maybe private schools) because it sure is more important than many subjects taught today. We focus on teaching people material that eventually becomes useless and out dated rather than the techniques needed for a person to explore their own interests and developing both sides of the brain. I think schools need to teach children from a young age to study and let them start by practising in class. Eventually this will reap great rewards for later grades and high school. People miss out on so much when they don’t include visualisation techniques in studying.
Also a healthy, fit body helps with learning yet very few schools make sport. However, it is also the students fault. Lack of discipline and laziness are just as big of problems. Learning is a life long process but schools seem to focus more on the fish than on the fishing rods
One thing I don't understand from school is they give you material from a young age to learn to study, yet they never teach you to study. Has mind mapping, mnemonics, SQ3R, how to overcome memory blocks and simply how to study for left brain and right brain. It has never been taught as a fully-fledged subject (maybe private schools) because it sure is more important than many subjects taught today. We focus on teaching people material that eventually becomes useless and out dated rather than the techniques needed for a person to explore their own interests and developing both sides of the brain. I think schools need to teach children from a young age to study and let them start by practising in class. Eventually this will reap great rewards for later grades and high school. People miss out on so much when they don’t include visualisation techniques in studying.
Also a healthy, fit body helps with learning yet very few schools make sport. However, it is also the students fault. Lack of discipline and laziness are just as big of problems. Learning is a life long process but schools seem to focus more on the fish than on the fishing rods
My 2 cents to the post. If you never allow the child to stand on his/her own don't expect them to stay standing when the mat is pulled out from under them (though it is an over exaggeration to this topic). My problem is that school tend to be left brained biased.
One thing I don't understand from school is they give you material from a young age to learn to study, yet they never teach you to study. Has mind mapping, mnemonics, SQ3R, how to overcome memory blocks and simply how to study for left brain and right brain. It has never been taught as a fully-fledged subject (maybe private schools) because it sure is more important than many subjects taught today. We focus on teaching people material that eventually becomes useless and out dated rather than the techniques needed for a person to explore their own interests and developing both sides of the brain. I think schools need to teach children from a young age to study and let them start by practising in class. Eventually this will reap great rewards for later grades and high school. People miss out on so much when they don’t include visualisation techniques in studying.
Also a healthy, fit body helps with learning yet very few schools make sport. However, it is also the students fault. Lack of discipline and laziness are just as big of problems. Learning is a life long process but schools seem to focus more on the fish than on the fishing rods
Yeah i agree, i do think there is always room to teach kids how to learn. But even then you hit the same problem of the masses only getting 20% for the "how to learn" exam and you end up at square one, with their knowledge being so incomplete its essentially useless. Educators have grappled with this question for generations, trying to develop some newfangled way to crack the code of why kids are just not interested. The truth is, at the end of the day it comes down to time at the grind stone and there is no shortcut for that. Parents just need to push their kids from day to day, monitoring, motivating, helping, moulding, etc - basically being parents. More than anything this country has a lack of good parents moulding the masses.
Its a deep problem.
PapercutPrincess
Well-Known Member
I suspect that too and I've seen it myself with how some people around me have raised their children. Some parents couldn't care less and would rather jet off to fancy places and leave the kids with their grandmother (who is a tad old to run after three kids and try get them all to sit down and do activities), and other parents sit and read books to the kids and play educational type of games with them like putting the blocks into the right shape etc. Seeing how those kids have grown up, some already in their teens... What you've said there fits perfectly. Group A ends up being worse off because of their conditions (stressful home environment, no place to study properly, stressful family relationships)... Group B tends to excel.
It's sad really
You had to pass all subjects as I recall. So getting an A wouldn't offset failing another subject. There may also have been core subjects that had to be passed, e.g. the languages. The pass mark was however 40% for higher grade subjects and less, probably 35%, for standard grade. And they would even do a lower grade conversion if someone got between 30% and 35%, so they'd still get passed. I remember seeing exactly that amongst the results posted outside the school after the Std 10 exams.
No, an E, 40-50% was a pass on higher grade. I know guys who got Es and still passed Std 10.
University is different. There 50% is required to pass. In most courses you're also required to pass the exam regardless of your marks from assignments during the year. There were exceptions to this though. Computer Science was one - the work during the year was the practical stuff and the exams the theory - someone strong mainly on the practical side could pass, someone primarily good at the theoretical aspect could pass and someone capable on both could get a high final mark.
Schools have the problem that they're trying to do something measurable. They want to be able to set tests and assign marks. And we've all been raised to be suspicious of any learning activity with no measurable goal. The US now takes this to the extreme with their focus on standardised tests. And many parents do something similar before their child even reaches school, organising every detail of their child's life and allowing them little time to simply play (nature's learning tool).My 2 cents to the post. If you never allow the child to stand on his/her own don't expect them to stay standing when the mat is pulled out from under them (though it is an over exaggeration to this topic). My problem is that school tend to be left brained biased.
One thing I don't understand from school is they give you material from a young age to learn to study, yet they never teach you to study. Has mind mapping, mnemonics, SQ3R, how to overcome memory blocks and simply how to study for left brain and right brain. It has never been taught as a fully-fledged subject (maybe private schools) because it sure is more important than many subjects taught today. We focus on teaching people material that eventually becomes useless and out dated rather than the techniques needed for a person to explore their own interests and developing both sides of the brain. I think schools need to teach children from a young age to study and let them start by practising in class. Eventually this will reap great rewards for later grades and high school. People miss out on so much when they don’t include visualisation techniques in studying.
Also a healthy, fit body helps with learning yet very few schools make sport. However, it is also the students fault. Lack of discipline and laziness are just as big of problems. Learning is a life long process but schools seem to focus more on the fish than on the fishing rods
I've complained about the lack of teaching how to learn and about inadequate preparation for tertiary study since I was still at school. There are also a number of problems with the way school is structured.
Often schools offer sport that is of no interest to a student. That's why I'd prefer sport taken out of school completely. Rather have sports clubs that anyone can join. That way everyone can take part in a sport about which they're enthusiastic.
I'm not too concerned with whether things can or should be labelled left or right brain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_function
You understand the part about moving the pass mark up to 50%? Guess not.
We do have to be careful not to push too much. There's a line, thankfully not too fine because children are pretty tough in many ways, as long as they are sure they have their parents there when they need them. But some parents go completely to the extreme.
Educators have grappled with the problem because it is a difficult one to solve. It's not the cut and dried situation we once believed. And we have learned a lot about how children's brains work, how they learn, but the way we school them has hardly changed.
Why are the children not interested?
I've done some teaching and at times it wasn't that the person needed it explained five times to get the concept, but that my fifth different way of explaining was a way that made sense to them. In my day I've had teachers who were willing to put in the time, explain things over and over, but would only repeat the same explanation versus ones who'd think of a different way to explain until they found something that worked. Is the latter a skill we can teach to teachers? It comes naturally to me.
It doesn't even have to be as narrow as games labelled as educational. Play is educational in itself. Mixed age group play is especially valuable. With better off parents though it isn't always lack of reading or something that can be labelled educational, but the paranoid risk aversion that has gripped society, so their children are no longer allowed to play and roam about. And if they are allowed to do something like ride a bicycle they're dressed to look like a commando with silly helmets and padding everywhere. On top of that overprotective parents are prone to doing everything for their child instead of encouraging self-reliance. The other extreme of course is the toughen up attitude where the child doesn't get the comfort and support they need when they're young. The latter attitude is something more likely to be inflicted on boys.