Hello!
I would really like to make this community as useful as possible to GCSE and A-level students.
The best way to do that is to ask all of you: what do you want from me here?
Of course, there are things I'll have to charge for to keep the business going and allow me to dedicate time to actually giving good resources, but I'll try to keep as much as possible free and public for all of you.
All your suggestions and ideas would really help!
Also, feel free to post your own posts! This is your community!
Hi all!
Thank you all so much for an amazing first six months of Shani's Tutoring. We've really progressed from me talking to myself in here to a small community where people come to get help and support.
My aim for this academic year is to really make Shani's Tutoring a safe and thriving education community – especially because we don't know how platforms like Reddit are going to react to the new social media ban.
But in order to do that properly , I'm going to need your help.
So I've come up with an idea on how we can promote the community more and also help you to get the top support in your courses!
It's called the Prefect Programme. You help me to increase the activity on the community and you get access to a dedicated space where I host weekly drop-in sessions for you to ask me questions and get me to look at small snippets of your work live on Google Meet.
To be eligible for the Prefect Programme, you need to help us to improve the activity of the forum weekly during term time. You can choose to do any of the following activities:
- Invite your friends to the community using invite links to the dedicated spaces. That way, we can track who's invited people!
- Post once a week with a problem, question, thought or piece of an essay you're working on! Or share some tips of your own!
- Promote Shani's Tutoring by sending links to students asking for help on other social media platforms.
- Commenting on other people's posts once a week.
- Leaving comments on blog posts and other posts on the website.
The more of these you do, the more I'm going to be able to stick around and help you on the community.
The idea is to have roughly 1000 students between GCSE, A-level and IB for all subjects on here! That will mean that when I post new content, the ad revenue and people buying small resources will be enough to cover the costs to keep running it.
This is only a limited time thing! I'm going to probably increase the criteria to join the Prefect Programme in the future. But if you want in straight away to get the weekly help I give, please go to the Prefects space and request to join!
Drop-in sessions will start from the first week of September, but I'll be open to answering discussions before that.
I look forward to having you there!
Hi all!
I'm so excited to introduce the new AO5 helper pages!
In light of my post about all the different kinds of AO5 that you can do in an exam, I've decided to create some pages on Shani's Tutoring to help you collect them all!
At my school, I have a spreadsheet with what I call 'AO5 Sound Bites': basically, pithy quotes from critics that you can memorise and use in your exams or in your NEA coursework.
Now, I'm turning each sound bite into a page of its own with some analysis of the quote and an explanation of how to use it in your essays.
Some of them are about specific texts, but most of them are written by critics who talk about life, society and the human condition in general. They're taken from critical theorists, philosophers, sociologists, political philosophers, and all sorts of other people that might have something interesting to say that you can use in your essays.
The first one comes from bell hooks (yes, lowercase name) and it's coming out later today.
I'd love any thoughts and feedback on it! If you'd like to see me do more, don't worry! I definitely will be! I'm also working on creating a bookmarking system where you can save the ones that are most relevant to your texts.
Make sure you use the comments to explain how it relates to your texts! That's an excellent way to revise!
Hi everyone!
We're getting to the part of the year where we have to say goodbye to all the Year 13 students (unless they want to stay and join our University spaces) and instead say hi to some new Year 12 students!
If you're joining for the first time, here are some facts about Shani's Tutoring that you might want to know:
- This was started quite recently by me as a solo project! I built most of the stuff on here by myself, so it's a slow process to add new information.
- I then added Patrick C. to the community to help me with managing moderation, safeguarding and also to run the French spaces (he's a native speaker).
- ALI A. came on board as our Maths and Physics teacher, as well.
Now we're a three-person team with plans to expand in the future as we grow and provide as much information and support to our users as possible!
Please feel free to post your questions!
We're trying to build a collaborative learning platform! We want you to show us what you'd like from us so we can grow together. So, if you ever have any thoughts or you need support, we'll do our best!
Text World Theory is a theory in cognitive linguistics that explains and analyses how we create images in our minds when we read, listen to or watch texts.
The text receiver is the person (or people) who reads, watches or listens to the text. They rely on the cues and devices in the text to help them interpret it.
A text producer is the person (or people) who creates the text. They use the tools at their disposal to make something that other people can interpret and derive meaning from.
Syntax is one of the six micro-linguistic levels you study in English language. It is about how we order words to make phrases, clauses and sentences.
Verbal irony is when someone says something that goes against the reality of their situation. They say it in a way that is noticeable to the people listening to them.
The maxim of quantity is the expectation that people will say just enough and give the right amount of information in a conversation. It is one of the four expectations that make up Grice's Maxims, otherwise known as the Cooperative Principle.
Pragmatics is one of the six microlinguistic levels you study in English language. It is about how language is used in context.