How hard is specialist?

[Damo17]

I personally don't do every question but tend to just look at a question and if I think it is very easy then skip it. Those questions that look hard or interesting I do of course keeping in mind the concepts to be covered. I think is is extremely important to go through many questions from essentials as they do make you think. I don't do many of the set questions from my teacher as our class is using maths quest which as everybody knows, has very easy questions.

I think it is not about how many questions you do but just making sure you understand all the concepts to be covered and feel very confident with them. Once the concepts are learned you should go onto questions from practice exams as many questions from the textbook you would not find in the exams. Doing practice exams in timed conditions and then going over what you couldn't do or got wrong gives much more consolidation to what you have learnt that the textbook questions.

Doing many practice exams and analysing your performance allows you to see clearly what are your strengths and weaknesses. So for your weaknesses, you could go through some textbook questions on that before going ahead with more exams or just go through those exam questions thoroughly and that should give you a much better understanding.

Well this is just my opinion.

[rhjc.1991]

Well, can you really?

For example, I thought was hard until I tried doing it.

[TrueTears]

Concepts + spam questions + exams = success. [unless you do not have talent for maths]

[Damo17]

Well, can you really?

For example, I thought was hard until I tried doing it.

Your right about that not being hard.

[rhjc.1991]

yeah and I'm quite dud at Spesh

[/0]

Specialist is mostly problem solving and little theory.
How much time you take depends on how much practice you want with problems. As long as you do the questions your teacher sets for you then you will have covered the 'theory' part. The majority of spesh problems you encounter in exams and tests will follow predictable patterns, and as long as you do the set questions you should be able to handle these. However, there will always be those problems which require more analytical thinking. You can handle them having only done the set questions, but it's better to have practice beforehand with extended-response questions. Probably doing 5-10 extra analysis-type questions per topic will prepare you well (this doesn't include exam/sac revision time) throughout the year, but remember that

I disagree, it is better to just do the whole book rather than set questions, teachers miss out on important questions.

We are, of course, assuming that the teachers have picked the important questions. While doing the whole book would be a strategy suited to people like you, it is not suited to everybody.

Assuming is not good. Especially when you have such bad teachers.
By personal experience, the teachers certainly have missed out on a lot of the good questions.

I agree, that can happen. But it doesn't necessarily warrant doing the entire book. It is not as if the good questions the teachers miss (which are pretty rare given mundane topic exercises) are priceless relics which won't turn up elsewhere. If the missed questions are exam-type questions then in all likelihood they will turn up in revision materials or extended response. If they aren't exam-type questions then they could be attempted out of curiosity but not out of necessity.

[m@tty]

Next year is the first time my school will be offering specialist,
and I will be the only student.
The teacher has not taught specialist before, so I am not sure
of his knowledge of how to teach it, or the actual concepts.

[TrueTears]

Specialist is mostly problem solving and little theory.
How much time you take depends on how much practice you want with problems. As long as you do the questions your teacher sets for you then you will have covered the 'theory' part. The majority of spesh problems you encounter in exams and tests will follow predictable patterns, and as long as you do the set questions you should be able to handle these. However, there will always be those problems which require more analytical thinking. You can handle them having only done the set questions, but it's better to have practice beforehand with extended-response questions. Probably doing 5-10 extra analysis-type questions per topic will prepare you well (this doesn't include exam/sac revision time) throughout the year, but remember that

I disagree, it is better to just do the whole book rather than set questions, teachers miss out on important questions.

We are, of course, assuming that the teachers have picked the important questions. While doing the whole book would be a strategy suited to people like you, it is not suited to everybody.

Assuming is not good. Especially when you have such bad teachers.
By personal experience, the teachers certainly have missed out on a lot of the good questions.

I agree, that can happen. But it doesn't necessarily warrant doing the entire book. It is not as if the good questions the teachers miss (which are pretty rare given mundane topic exercises) are priceless relics which won't turn up elsewhere. If the missed questions are exam-type questions then in all likelihood they will turn up in revision materials or extended response. If they aren't exam-type questions then they could be attempted out of curiosity but not out of necessity.

The more you do the better you get. Why won't you do more?

[wombifat]

Next year is the first time my school will be offering specialist,
and I will be the only student.
The teacher has not taught specialist before, so I am not sure
of his knowledge of how to teach it, or the actual concepts.

If you have the teacher i think you may have, he's pretty smart. He got the marks to do medicine apparently.

[mypurpleundercracka]

Next year is the first time my school will be offering specialist,
and I will be the only student.
The teacher has not taught specialist before, so I am not sure
of his knowledge of how to teach it, or the actual concepts.

how can they afford to run the class with a single student?

[m@tty]

I go to Heatherton Christian College, and I am guessing at the teacher
because there is currently not someone on staff who has experiance with specialist maths.

[zzdfa]

Specialist is mostly problem solving and little theory.
How much time you take depends on how much practice you want with problems. As long as you do the questions your teacher sets for you then you will have covered the 'theory' part. The majority of spesh problems you encounter in exams and tests will follow predictable patterns, and as long as you do the set questions you should be able to handle these. However, there will always be those problems which require more analytical thinking. You can handle them having only done the set questions, but it's better to have practice beforehand with extended-response questions. Probably doing 5-10 extra analysis-type questions per topic will prepare you well (this doesn't include exam/sac revision time) throughout the year, but remember that

I disagree, it is better to just do the whole book rather than set questions, teachers miss out on important questions.

We are, of course, assuming that the teachers have picked the important questions. While doing the whole book would be a strategy suited to people like you, it is not suited to everybody.

Assuming is not good. Especially when you have such bad teachers.
By personal experience, the teachers certainly have missed out on a lot of the good questions.

I agree, that can happen. But it doesn't necessarily warrant doing the entire book. It is not as if the good questions the teachers miss (which are pretty rare given mundane topic exercises) are priceless relics which won't turn up elsewhere. If the missed questions are exam-type questions then in all likelihood they will turn up in revision materials or extended response. If they aren't exam-type questions then they could be attempted out of curiosity but not out of necessity.

The more you do the better you get. Why won't you do more?

diminishing returns
the time spent on doing all the textbook questions could be better spent on doing past exams/other subjects/relaxing ;p

[TonyHem]

Doing every question is really a pain and probably a major waste of time.
We get told to do like every 2nd question, or the 1st column because it is all the same kind of question. ( But the last few of each "question" are always harder, so if you find the 1st one easy, maybe just do the last row/column or w/e)

[shinny]

The more you do the better you get. Why won't you do more?

This is obvious, but is it practical? I don't think everyone has the motivation to do the entire book. Diverting most of my time to English, I barely even did the exercises and just stuck with the examples we were given in class (mind that I had a ridiculously good spesh teacher though). Also, doing the entire book often gets you into the trap of just applying a 'copy-paste' method to each question section, and not really understanding the concepts behind it. Whilst obviously it's not harmful, there's usually time better spent elsewhere, or just simply not enough time to even do every exercise for most people. My advice is for people to get the Essential spesh book and do some of the extended response style questions from there. Lots to learn from that book unlike others such as MathsQuest which was just rubbish. While you'll probably get stuck often, getting stuck in spesh actually helped me more than anything as I'd spend perhaps an hour on a question, but in the end, completely understand the concept and disregard the need for simply 'grinding' questions for that chapter.

[TrueTears]

True, but to get into the mentality that "oh I'll just do the set exercise my teacher sets and I'll be fine" is not good. One should always do more questions than what the set exercises are.