During the session we got through rather less than I had anticipated – I think when Alan ran the show last year we covered a lot more. However, I don’t think that mattered too much. I could have run a whole revision week. In fact, maybe that will be the result when I post the material on my forum.
I was also a bit surprised about the seating – I think I moved the front two tables, and then other people set up the rear two and sat at them! Perhaps I had indicated they should help? Of course, a teacher will expect everyone to crowd onto the back row.
As we were going to be looking at the whiteboard and the screen I felt that a row was the right solution.
The glossary matching exercise proved surprisingly tough. I may need to trim the material down for next year. It also took longer than I anticipated. However I like the fact it got people moving around and talking, so I would probably keep the format.
The ‘silly mistakes’ section could certainly be trimmed and updated.
For the revision questions I had deliberately not over-prepared myself. I wanted the students to have an opportunity to see plenty of mistakes cropping up, and to genuinely have an opportunity to discuss and solve the problems themselves. I was very pleased when they noticed the cannonball time they had worked out was for the upwards journey only.
The penalty for this approach was that we moved very slowly. To some extent, my inability to see the whiteboard slowed us down. I think the next time I would probably have my own answers written out so that I could copy them onto the board as we talked. And I would switch to using prepared solutions on the screen after doing the first couple of questions on the whiteboard.
As you point out, the students got through the Part A exam questions very quickly. I thought they would, and we had no need to go through anything on the whiteboard.
I still feel I am at an early stage with S207. It is very different from the other modules I work on, which often skim the surface of topics. Meeting with students is really helpful in helping me see what they find hard to understand, and in identifying ways to explain topics. The question on spectacles was quite unexpected, so I will give that a bit more thought.
My thoughts on the S207 session