I apologise for posting this here. I really didn't want to however I wanted to keep my identity private since I know some people on here know me in real life lol . Adding on this is a review. So I apologise again for posting this here in this section but this was the only way for me to post this privately.
[Warning= This is going to be lengthy lol but I could assure you that it would be informative :) that's if you're interested in going to this school. I will post the review in episodes kinda so one post at a time just to avoid it being too lengthy, if it was just one whole post it would be a heck of a lot to go through. At least this way you could go through sections easily compared to a huge chunk of writing. But overall I am writing this for mainly those who I saw ask for a review ]
But I'll start by saying hello to the reader and how's it going?
I thought it would be useful to anyone who was interested in going here as this was what I looked for before deciding to go to this school but did not find it. My hope is that after you have read this, you'd have a better sense of the environment, students, teachers and the educational approach provided by the school. I promise to give a honest answer to how this school is like. In terms about myself, I would like to share that I had studied a mixture of humanities and science based courses but my combination of courses were mainly in the science side. In this essay like review haha I'll list a bunch of things that you could expect at this sixth form college, sadly many things are negative. To be frank, I would not advise anyone to go to this school- especially for the sciences course. But people could receive a different experience to mine as we are all different and handle things differently. My experience there has been quite negative. I've just finished year 12 at Bsix so I can tell you my experiences from last year to now, including some of the experiences with my fellow mates and friends from the same school.
1) You could have many teachers come and go in one subject/course
-What I mean by this is this, say if you studied Physics or Maths at Bsix, you could have 3-4 teachers in that subject alone come and leave in that same year! Many of my friends and I had teachers come and go in our classes. With me, I took maths at AS and had 6 maths teachers from September to May which is ridiculous. This may not be a problem to some but to me and others it happened to, it was a total nightmare. It mean't you could not establish a strong student/teacher relationship with teachers but rather you had to try and keep up with new names and try to get used to new different teaching styles. Each term we would expect someone new in our classes just for one subject i.e maths and this sometimes happened in our other subjects. The most annoying bit was each time a new teacher came, we had to start somewhere quite new in terms of chapters. This was fine with maths as we ended up finishing all chapters but with courses such as Physics it was not. We ended up having ch apters we hadn't learnt and a new teacher who wasn't sure on what to teach and not teach. My advice is to really consider this aspect because though it doesn't seem important, teachers really influence what you study at school and the structure of your classes. In subjects such as English Language/ Literature- it would be difficult to consistently have new teachers as the subject is heavily based on your discussions in classrooms and notes discussed with your teachers. It could be confusing too as different teachers expect different things in terms of marking so be careful.
2) This is a continuation from point one but lack of teachers in a subject.
I know you're probably thinking huh, how if many teachers come and go in that school but please hear me out. An example is with the English department. Last year we only had two teachers teach this subject in the whole school and both left this year. You could find the same thing happening with other subjects such as Drama and in some subjects, you'll find only one teacher in the whole school! This is a major disadvantage as if the course you've applied to only has one teacher in the whole school teaching that course, if you do not get along with that particular teacher too bad as this would be your only source of schooling in that subject and chance of achieving a good grade (especially if they are the ones marking your coursework. This applies to those wanting to do subjects with coursework mainly). But I suffered this as I had only two teachers in one of my subjects that I both didn't particularly like. Not because they were bad people but their teaching styles, their teac hing overall did not suite me and other students that I had spoke to. One also was very unhelpful, this teacher didn't give clear feedback or mark coursework at a consistent rate which was frustrating. They even drastically changed coursework dates. I mean essays that were due in March became due in January! The worse part was that for some students, during the week it was moved to had very important science particles that contributed to their final grade at A level. It was that stressful and serious. When I had complained about what was happening, I was told that this is how university is like but I'm sure at university dates are set wisely and are purely set without movements, let alone drastic movements. They do not just decide one day hey let's move the due date 2-3 months earlier for course work.
3) Great library so take the advantage of it (in a good way)
I'm trying to not focus so much on the negatives as there are positives also which is while I'll try to keep this whole review countered. A huge advantage is the library and computer rooms. At the library, you have free printing and free WiFi which you could connect to with your own facilities i.e phone, Ipad, laptop etc. The computers are ok but they are timed which is expected as it wouldn't be fair if students remained at one computer for long hours. I must say though that this year for some reason the computers began to play up. They would often shut down on their own to reboot and update which sucked if you hadn't saved your work. And this took place at any time, it was so unpredictable...you literally had students who had just logged in but their computer shut down immediately then those who were about to save their final drafts to a piece of work, theirs went too :/ It was so sad but funny to some extent :#...but on a serious note overall it was sad and annoying, espec ially if you were about to save work and Bamm it's all gone because your computer decided to switch off to 'update'. Though, I must say I truly think they are working on this problem because during half term we saw a team of technicians who since then regularly visit so we'll wait and see if this issue would be resolved.
Put the internet to work for you.
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