In Grade 5, Maya was convinced that she had no talent in Maths and therefore she found it useless to make efforts to understand the exercises in class. Her attitude started to change only two years later, after moving to Avenor College as she started to study with her current Maths teacher, Mihaela Ancuța. “I strongly believe that if you are not on the same page with someone, however hard you try to get along with that person, it won’t work”, Maya says.
Miss Mihaela’s teaching style and Cambridge methods made Maya realise that she started to understand the language of Maths. As a result, she was paying more attention in class, answering the teacher’s questions and her learning progress was becoming visible.
Grade 8 came with yet another challenge. Maya initially wanted to go to a state high school following the Romanian Curriculum and she started preparing for the National Evaluation exam.
At Avenor College, students in Middle School can decide to continue their studies in a Romanian High School or switch to the Cambridge curriculum and enrol at Avenor International High School. As a result, our school provides a differentiated learning system helping students prepare for the exams they have to take at the end of Grade 8: the National Evaluation exam, in the Romanian system, or the Checkpoint exams, in the Cambridge system.
A difficult decision
Maya was having a hard time adapting to the requirements of the National Evaluation exam and she was really discouraged. All that changed one afternoon, following a tearful conversation with her mother. Returning home after attending a parent’s meeting, the mother asked Maya if she wanted to switch to the Cambridge system.
„I immediately bursted into tears”, Maya recalls. After calming down, she told her mother that, in fact, she also wanted to make the switch, but was afraid to tell her that she had changed her mind. The decision felt right to both of them, but it wasn’t an easy one. Maya had to catch up with her colleagues, because the first tests, in December 2015, revealed that her Maths level was really low. With help from her maths teacher, form tutor and her colleagues Maya managed to close the gap in just a few months. In March, when she had her Cambridge Checkpoint mock exams, she got 5.7 out of 6.0 – the maximum score.
„For me it was incredible. Before the mocks, we were having tests every week and you could see on the score chart my results improving even by one hundredth”, Maya recalls.
The advantages of the Cambridge system
In the Cambridge curriculum, Mathematics is being taught differently than in the Romanian system. For every unit, there is less information the students need to learn, the exercises focus on real life situations and teachers can spend more lessons explaining and practicing the same subject.
„Students don’t memorise formulae, they learn them by deduction from different exercises”, Mihaela Ancuța explains. For example, in the Cambridge curriculum, students don’t learn to calculate the surface area of a cuboid by remembering a formula, like in the Romanian system. They learn that the surface area represents the area of all 6 faces added together and by calculating it, they discover the formula. Thus they get accustomed to logical and fast thinking and using mathematical principles that they will be able to remember and apply all their lives.
Feeling loved and supported
In the month following the mocks, Maya became encouraged and confident. She was doing Maths exercises every day, her mother took time off work to be by her side and it all came together when the Checkpoint exam results were announced, in June 2016: Maya’s score in Maths was a solid 5.9.
“Having the support of my colleagues and of the school helped me the most. I felt love coming towards me from everyone”, Maya says.
Now in Grade 9, Maya feels more comfortable during Maths lessons although she still struggles sometime but now she is confident that she can overcome any obstacle or setback before the Cambridge IGCSE exams in the summer of 2018.
“The most important thing is that I can ask questions if I don’t understand. I can ask not twice but even five times. I can go to the teacher during the breaks asking for her help and she never tells me that she’s already explained it five times. She explains it again, each time in a different way.”
