How do I deal with this? I'm having a moan!

[pabrighton0]

My DD has reported that the class are often given exercises that they need to do together with their talk partner, such as write a story. DD will try to use more interesting and descriptive wow words and synonyms when she can. She has a problem remembering new vocab at times, but I am working on that with her. She finds that her talk partner doesn’t understand some of the words that DD wants to include in their writing, so she then explains them to her. The teacher will then question the talk partner as to the meaning of the words and because the talk partner has forgotten the meaning, the words are not permitted to be used in the writing piece.

Hi SamB,

I would be fuming. It's the teacher's job to teach, children are there to learn.

But I had a similar situation. DD1 is a particularly caring child. We have a few children in the class that are extremely shy and DD1 talks to them like to any other children - so these children often seek to be with DD1.

At school, they set for Maths. They have English where they sit in tables according to ability. Science ends up being sacrificed for "social cohesion" - they join any child from the bottom table with one from the top, and so on.

I thought - fair enough - DD1 is sitting with this shy child for a couple of terms. Now after it started sounding like she was being asked to do the teacher's job, I used one of the meetings with the HT to make sure I would set our expectations clearly. I did not need to lie when I said I actually like that DD1 is a helpful caring child - we make a point to ensure that DDs appreciate how lucky they are in many respects and that they are expected to be giving something back to society. But I talked about the way in which DD2 would dream in Science lessons when she was with a similarly minded child and how they would stretch each other and get to learn so much more, become really creative and enjoying school. I also questioned the fairness of always having the same child playing the supporting role. DW job is in Science, so the point was sufficiently made.

DD feels that the teacher has her favourites and that she isn’t one of them, plus the teacher is ‘strict’ so although DD would like for me to speak to her, she is a little worried. I was intending to speak to the teacher today after school about these issues, but I just wondered whether anyone had any words of wisdom to offer?

I'd say asking for a meeting will give the teacher a bit more time to pay more attention to your DD, so the problem may go away. As for DD's worries, I had the same and I made it clear that unless I could be convinced she could handle it herself (which would obviously be preferable), it was not worth her trying to stop us being normal parents... So we are now occasionally called fussy parents, but she accepted the principle.