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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Pat Kenny Show. With Timber Living Log Cabins. Saturday and Sunday from 10am on Newstalk. Conversation that counts. Well, now, we want to talk about one of those stories I mentioned in my headlines, and that's about Maths Paper One. We're joined by Eoin O'Leary, Head of Maths at the Jurisdiction Centre.ie and a teacher at Kinsale Community School. Eoin, good morning.
Good morning, Pat. Thanks for having me on again.
Now, there's been a lot of kerfuffle online about Maths Paper One being a bit of a stinker. What do you think?
Well, yes, the first thing to say for students and their parents, just to put their mind at ease, students will score better in paper one than they actually felt on the day.
Chapter 2: What challenges did students face in Maths Paper One?
And students did, a lot of students did find it hard and some students found it very hard. And to give a bit of an analogy here, if they were in a marathon, it kind of started off okay, but the last few miles they found were like they were running uphill into the wind when they were coming to the finish line. So they did find that very tough.
Now, I've looked at the paper this morning and paper one is kind of classic mathematics. You know, you use various formulae, you do, I suppose, classic deduction and so on. And if you're good at that kind of calculation, it's fairly straightforward. See, section one, section one.
Absolutely, section A, absolutely, Pat. And what I would say, just what you described there is what teachers, including myself and others, our first reaction when we looked at the paper was that section A, question one to six, were not too bad because they were what you might describe the classic type of questions. While not being easy...
people would identify where the maths was and they would kind of know what to do.
When I started off on Section A, Question 1, Part A, solve this equation, 5 equals 1 plus the square root of 8 plus 7. And like it took me 20 seconds to get that, the answer is 9. So I would have been greatly encouraged with that. You know, that's dead simple.
That was a good start. And Pat, in fairness, you're on 10 out of 10 for that part. And the good news for students is that there were, I'm going to say, some accessible parts such as the one you just described there. And the reality is this. Those parts will be worth a lot of marks when it comes to the marking scheme.
because I was looking to have a great teacher named Joe Kingston, and he corrected state exams for 50 years.
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Chapter 3: How do teachers assess the difficulty of Maths Paper One?
And he always said the reality is a hard paper must be marked generously. That's the way it has to go, because there has to be the bell curve that they expect at the end. And as you said, there were some parts in there like you would have been greatly encouraged at the start.
And then when you hit the harder parts, the reality for the students on the Friday evening, coming up to maybe half three, four o'clock after a long week doing exams and prepping for the exams, it just was tough at the end. And some of them said the section B was where it started to feel like a puzzle.
Now, that's right. I mean, there's a question about piano tuning. And I must say that it, you know, it boggled me. This is in Section B of Paper 1. I looked at that and I thought, how do I even begin this?
Yes. And so for questions like that, so you mentioned the classic maths. So questions one to six, Section A, they were what the old-fashioned typical maths. But the Section B is now context and applications called problem solving. And while the topics in there... calculus, area and volume, sequences and series, things like that. They weren't the kind of expected ones.
They came up in an unusual way. And what you're describing there about the piano tuning, that was an exponential function. But what the students kind of felt and what they experienced in the pressure of the exam hall was that they felt it was like an English exam. They were trying to read through all those texts to get to the maths.
Yeah, like we had in this particular paper one, we had Ria who has a mortgage or she's borrowing to buy a car and we're doing compound interest and all of that. And, you know, a bit kind of wordy to go through that. Then we have Ria who's tuning the piano. We've got Ella who's in the gym and we've got Derek doing something else. I mean, I know what they're trying to do.
They're trying to make it kind of personal and relevant to the student or their parents when they bring it home. You know, of course, I've filled a cylinder with water at a certain rate and I've poured that water into another cylinder. No, you haven't. That's not the real world. Come on. So my criticism of Project Maths is that often it's a bit like that old thing. You know, the bus comes up.
Four people, you know, John drives the bus up to the bus stop. Four people get on.
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Chapter 4: What types of questions were included in Section A of the exam?
Three people get off. Then they go to the next bus stop. Ten people get on and four people get off. And then so it goes. And at the end, the question is, what's the bus driver's name? The bus driver's name is John. You know, it's that kind of wordy stuff trying to, you know, create mathematics into all sorts of into little essays, really.
Well, Pat, I think it's fair to say that the students and their parents and their teachers would agree with you after Friday. And it was those wordy questions that took so long to kind of figure out.
And as I said, the pressure of the exam, that can be such a difficult experience for students that in the question you described, you know, by the time they get to the end of that, they mightn't have even known John was on the bus because... You know, it just was, it got so confusing for them at a certain point.
And as they see the clock ticking towards half four and after all the hard work they put in during the year, that's the feeling they leave the hall with. Now, it is important to note that in the cold light of day and in the days afterwards, they will have got far more marks than they feel because they remember the part where They'll remember the part where they didn't get something right.
But they mightn't remember the early parts, like you said, question one, where they got that and it was nine marks. They might have done that in 20 seconds, as you might have. But that could be worth 10 marks. And the harder part about the difficult bits about the tuning the piano could be worth fewer marks.
And overall, the message I would give students is, you know, after, you know, when they have their breakfast this morning, it's time to focus on paper two, which is tomorrow. And paper two would hopefully be a more straightforward one where they feel they can demonstrate their knowledge.
Yeah, and of course, the problem with doing a paper on a Friday and being upset about it, you're going into a weekend of study, and you're all upset, and your focus is, and you're thinking, oh God, paper two coming up, it's going to be a stinker too. One comment coming in, Maths Paper 1 was so tough, students are upset.
Questions not seen before, and as one said, there was more English on the Maths Paper than on English 1. Well done to the department. Future students will just do past maths, because everything, honours maths will not be worth all the time spent on study. So there you are. Anyway, that's one comment. Eoin, thank you very much for joining us. And don't forget, there is that bell curve.
So if any paper in any topic is really a stinker, they correct it to make sure that you get the same distribution of grades as you did in previous years. Eoin O'Leary, Head of Maths at the tuitioncentre.ie and the teacher at Kinsale Community School. The Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk. With Timber Living Log Cabins.
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