2 Things Every Parent Wishes They'd Known Sooner

Unidentified speaker, speaker, role not identified · [04:00]This is a very simplified version of it, and we start at the bottom with cognitive level one, which is remembering and recognizing facts. Cognitive level number two is understanding, and understanding what the facts mean. Cognitive level number one and two are considered lower order thinking skills. The next four cognitive levels, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create, are considered higher order cognitive skills. Now, we use the CAPS document as a basis for understanding cognitive levels, and they've simplified it a little bit easier in terms of how we structure our exams and our tests, and how we engage with that information. And they've said cognitive level one is the first two cognitive levels of Bloom's taxonomy. So when I'm referring to cognitive level one from now onwards, I'm referring to the first two. Analyze and apply are cognitive level number two, and create and evaluate are cognitive level number three. Okay. What do you suppose those percentages mean that I've just added to the slide? To your mark, to your exam construction, yes, Gabs? So in most exams, between thirty and forty percent of the exam is cognitive level one. I helped my child and they knew everything when I went to school. They got forty percent for the exam, which meant they got a hundred percent for everything that you taught them at home. Cognitive level two Makes up thirty to forty percent, and cognitive level three makes up the other thirty, plus minus thirty percent. And why I say plus minus, it varies from subject to subject, and the IEB places are higher, it is weighted more to the higher cognitive levels, and often their papers are cognitive level three is sitting at about forty percent.

Unidentified speaker, speaker, role not identified · [11:53]Let's bake a red velvet birthday cake for six people. It's a class activity, so we engage with them at work. Cognitive level number one, let the students engage in this. Let's make a shopping list. Let's buy the ingredients. Cognitive level number two, the requirements say fifty grams of something, yet the packets they sell are only twenty grams. How many packets do I need? The answer's not two. Conversions, lot of recipes have Imperial, measurement, and you have to convert it back to decimal. Then what happens in cognitive level number three is it asks for a round pan, if any, anyone's done any baking, it is thirty centimeters in diameter and exactly seven centimeters deep. You have one that's twenty-five and is ten centimeters deep. Or we don't have a round one, we have a square one. But it kind of looks like it's going to fit in there. And we couldn't find the canola oil from some un, unknown rainforest that's required in the, the, except if it's a Woolies recipe. So we've had to improvise with something that is oil-based that will do the same thing and not alter the, the, the taste of it. We do this all day and every day, don't we? The homework that went home. Cut out pictures from old magazines of different cakes used for various celebrations around the world. Parents look at this going, this is insignificant, it's boring, why must they just cut out papers and be researching on the internet? It looks like YouTube time to me. So let's just, not important, go to bed, let's do whatever we need to do. This was the exam question. Describe how you would prepare a blue velvet cake for a Chinese wedding with 20 guests. Were they taught a blue velvet cake for a Chinese wedding in class? Can we use the skills that we've learnt in class and a bit of research we were meant to do for homework to answer that question? Do you think this would be worth more marks than the original assessment in the classroom? Absolutely. So the class activity plus the homework will lead us to being able to answer the exam question. So this is put in a nice little box and tied with a bow, cause it looks nice and easy. It's a little bit, a little bit more messy usually, but you're getting the picture. So why it's worth more is that suddenly the recipe we had was for a cake, or in this case our butter croissant, but it was for eight, and now we have to make twenty. So now we have to learn how to use proportion and increase the recipes propor, the, the ingredients proportionally. Not only that, it said a Chinese wedding cake. So we then had to go and understand what Chinese wedding cakes look like in part of our design and our decorations. That's where the research came in. So now we're creating something that we've never done before.

Unidentified speaker, speaker, role not identified · [18:20]So one of the things we talk about in study skills is stress and stress management. Stress is bad. True or false? Hands up for true, hands down for false. Guys, if we weren't stressed, we wouldn't be here. Because the cavemen that preceded us would have died during winter, because they wouldn't have had food, they wouldn't have had fire, and they wouldn't have had clothing. So the appropriate amount of stress is good for you. Why? Because it motivates. And as human beings, we will always take the path of least resistance and do nothing if we could. Who'd rather spend their entire year on holiday? Don't worry about emails. If you don't put up your hand, you're lying. The thing is that you have to find That golden spot, the Goldilocks area of it, where it's just right, the right amount of stress that brings about the best amount of performance. Too much stress debilitates. Too little stress, we're not motivated. So it's not made difficult for the sake of making it difficult. It's an understanding that true learning only happens when we have to work for it. As Grok was talking about dopamine levels, when you have succeeded at something difficult, you get a hit, there's a rush. If it's too easy, you kind of think that it was too easy. Is the rush as big? No. It needs to be hard enough to get that dopamine kick so that you can move forward and that you want to do some more work, some more learning. The same thing happens when it comes to your skill and difficulty levels. If a child's skill is too low, I can't do it, what do we do? We give up. If it's too difficult or perceived to be too difficult, we give up. If it's too easy, the child becomes bored. So it's about finding the balance between the skill level and the difficulty level

Unidentified speaker, speaker, role not identified · [20:33]So one of the things that I really enjoy talking about are J curves. Who knows what a J curve is? The baseline of a J curve is essentially the normal and what we expect to happen, and it dips below normal, and then it goes through past normal. So this is a nice J curve, and it's probably sitting about there. So when we start a project, and this J curve for me represents something that I feel quite passionate about, why we always leave things to the last minute, and we never have enough time to do it. We overestimate our skill until we really realize what it takes to do the job, and then we've got a lot of less, a lot less time to upskill ourselves to do the job, and then we eventually get there. Some people thrive on that. I think it's creating artificial stress. So we start by going clueless, I don't know what I have to do, and then naively confident. You think you know what you have to do, you still don't really know, but it's fine, I've got this, I have this idea in my head of what I'm going to be doing. Mom, it's sorted, I have an idea, I'm on top of this. Deadline looms, discouragingly realistic. I actually don't know as much as I thought I knew. There's a lot more work to be done, help crisis, maybe a tantrum, maybe some tears, and that's just from the parents. And then we start and engage on our learning curve, which at this point might be quite a steep one because we've left it so late. This ties into Jax's neuroscience. And if we look at what people are now terming positive frustration, did you know there was such a thing? I sit in the car and I don't think anything positive about the frustration I'm feeling. But in terms of preceding learning, there needs to be some discomfort and frustration, otherwise there's no need for that. We don't find ourselves open to the experience. Where real learning is happening is where we stretch our minds, where our brains are hurting, and we are working in the cognitive level three space where we are taking knowledge from different areas and putting it together.

Unidentified speaker, speaker, role not identified · [24:40]So what do parent, what do kids need to be spending their time on? If you divide their time roughly into six parts, one part of their time is for rote memorizing. It's the push-ups, the times tables, the formulas. The stuff that should just be at the tip of your finger. In the old days, when we didn't have cell phones, it would be memorizing people's telephone numbers. Okay. Two thirds of their time doing class activities and textbook activities. That's where cognitive level two is. You may help them with cognitive level one by quizzing them in the car on the way to school. Cognitive level number two is in their class activities and their textbook activities, and they're appropriate activities for engaging the students and engaging them when they're practicing for tests and exams. And then in preparation for the tests and exams, they should be spending half of their time doing past papers. But there's a special way of doing past papers. We don't just sit down and do the entire paper and then mark it, because what we've done is spend two hours or three hours practicing the wrong thing. And once you've learned something, to unlearn it takes a lot longer. So what we do is, you find two or three past papers, you start by identifying the similar concepts, do the first concept, mark it. Is it correct? Yes. Move on to the second paper, same concept. Do it, it's correct. Move on to the third concept, third, the same concept in the third paper. Got it wrong, fix it. Now I have learnt it properly. If I go all three and then mark, I might have been practicing it incorrectly. And we do that concept by concept. The Matrix I like them to do five or six papers, because it gives them the broadest possible scope in how questions are being asked. Once we've done that, and we know that conceptually we understand the work that needs to be done, and we're doing it correctly, we then practice for our exam. So then we do the papers from the top, let me rephrase that, we do the whole paper. Not necessarily from the top to the bottom. But from the easiest to the hardest. Does that make sense, guys? We do it from the easiest to the hardest, but that paper in its entirety, and then we mark it and it's under time conditions.