The brainlessness of an English Tutor. Fuming

You do realise that no bad words can be said about teachers on here don’t you. Teachers are saints and can do no wrong!
I’ve seen it all and if I see any hint of the behaviour I’ve experienced and seen happen in my time I will be that parent. Don’t feel bad for looking out for your kid.

How long have you been teaching?

You sound extremely naive, happily making assumptions and judging a situation you know nothing about.

And how dare you undermine your colleagues on a forum, how rude and disrespectful is that?

You’d be slaughtered in the staffroom if that got out!

On a separate, but perhaps interesting note, your writing style is repetitive and not what I would expect of an English teacher …..

‘I bla bla…..’, ‘I bla bla ….’

This reflects a sense of self-importance, of someone more than a little condescending who thinks they should be running the school.

So what time do you stop your DD watching TV then, and/or turn off her internet/social media access? 🤔

WHATS THE F BOOK...Hahaha 🙂

All this "age guidance" talk - this book has had 3 different age guidances just in this thread. 14 in one location, 13 on another and 12 in one country

See how it makes it difficult?

You really think that the 'useless middle management ' want all the box ticking?

And Peyton Place, that was another we read at about that age too!

Also don’t get this waste of valuable learning time with form class. 🙄

if they did less box ticking and pointless admin to keep useless middle management kids could learn twice as much in half the time.

That book is a rip off of a film and another book. Even the concept is terrible and inappropriate for children under at least 16!

maybe age recommendations should be brought back.

I find it incredibly tone deaf of an English teacher to choose this book. Not just for the content but for the commercialisation of plagiarism. AI couldn’t have done worse in this case. 🙄

why not Anne franks diary? Hell, even the Star Wars books have existential and philosophical questions and far more suitable for that age range.

I haven't read the book in question, but certainly going by the synopsis I don't think the subject matter is particularly heavy going. Comparing it to soaps like Hollyoaks or Eastenders going out early evening, it is probably a bit tame.

It appears to touch on sex, love, controlling guardians. All the things that young people of that age are normally beginning to experience, whether we like it or not.

C U next Tuesday should do it.

Speaking as an Ex English Teacher... I would not expect, or indeed allow, my class or tutor group to read a book with a recommended age two years higher than their actual age. I suspect this has been chosen by one person in the Department for each year group without really thinking it through. My tutor group often got wholly inappropriate book suggestions from my colleagues.

In this instance, I don't think you are "that Mom". You need to speak to the Head/Principal about this as the Head of Department clearly hasn't. Schools usually have strict safeguarding rules around age appropriateness and this applies to literature as well as visual media or music.

I wouldn't expect a 12 year old to be reading Clarissa or Tom Jones either and those are classis literature (first one has a girl pinned down and raped in it, the second he's a serial philanderer if anyone asks 😂). This isn't about censorship anymore than giving a movie an 18 rating.

Except we don't know the context or the tone of those three words. I would assume that they were part of a longer conversation, and while they could be seen as flippant, they could also have been said as part of an empathetic effort on the part of the tutor to help the DD manage her discomfort going forward.

ETA that dammit, I somehow managed to miss all the other pages. And yes, it turns out that the kid lied and OP hasn't even read beyond the blurb of the book.

Who'd be a secondary school teacher...

Concepts is what I meant. It depends on the maturity of the reader, obv. Some twelve year olds might understand, some might not.

Grange Hill is a great example but very child friendly, Phil Redmond is a genius. But imagine if you'd been watching, the messages about drug use and bullying are going in, but then Bullet Baxter and Mrs McClusky are having a picnic and apropos of nothing he says "I ought to rape you" (to give my previous example in that context).
And ours was a fantastic primary with a great library, it's the shock value of that sudden step up to seemingly utterly unfiltered stuff, at 11, that I'm not sure about (to say the least).

No, Farenheit 451 is a great classic. It is about a future dystopian world where the authorities identify the cause of people's unhappiness and dissatisfaction as originating from ideas and example lives and experiences as might be described and found in books. The easiest way to make people happy is to remove the content that makes them unhappy, dissatisfied and sad. All books are banned, the fire brigade's purpose is to root out hidden books (usually through a tip-off) and burn them. It is an offence to have books. Rather than lose a favourite book, a group of people have committed particular novels to memory, they become the book, handing it down verbally to people before they die so the book can be carried on. In time, a more tolerant world will prevail and they will be called up to commit the books they hold in their memory once again to paper. Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper burns, it is also the cap badge on the fireman's helmet.

We got hold of My Secret Garden aged 12 and read it aloud to each other. Your daughter needs to get a bit more worldly

Ah sorry. Think I misread this and thought people were saying it wasn't a UK phrase. I grew up in Northern England.

Children gain that skill as soon as they come out the womb. Despite being unable to talk, babies can have parents feed, change, soothe etc or if in a mood can have a parent running in circles. They just get more adept at is as the get older. 😁

Should you be interested in those statistics, by the way @puzluz, you might like to start with the work of the developmental psychologist Nancy Darling. She has undertaken several robust studies which indicate that up to 98% of teenagers have lied to their parents. It is a normal developmental phase and there is some really interesting work around why children do it - partly to protect their parents, sometimes to avoid an argument.

I don't know how many thousands of teenagers you have direct experience of working with. At a conservative estimate in my career so far it's probably in the region of four thousand for me. I love working with teenagers; I'm very well qualified and I make a choice every year to continue to do the work that I do, and I consider it a privilege to work with young people. Within the context of this work I've supported groups of children through the horrendous trauma of losing one of their peers to suicide. Please don't ever reference child suicide to score a cheap point on the internet again. It is shameful.

So, you admit that your child was actually rather economical with the truth and that 'I will admit I have not read it myself'?

Great basis for an argument.

Your daughter knows how to push your buttons.

Yeah, I've never heard of that in the US, but apparently I was wrong, since other posters have heard of it. Is it just a regular teacher, or is it actually a tutor?

I work in a school in the UK. We have form tutors.
edit. - I realise people were talking about US schools.