@QueenMabby sounds like she's got plenty on but she'll handle it! DD2 doesn't have her year 10 exams until the week after half term, so it feels like it's all really dragging. I failed to make the meeting about the exams - which seems to have been ominously full of 'this is how we will decide which A-Levels your kids take', because we're 100 miles away, but suspect she'll be OK.
Meanwhile I'm wondering if you guys can sense check my possibly ridiculous 'mummy moment' over my year 10. As I think I've said, she moved schools in September, because she has a government music place at specialist school - though it is a school with non-specialists in it as well, confusingly. It's been a big shift but I think she has done well.
However, she mentioned last week that although she has never done anything wrong, and is in the top two or three in all of her classes (in many cases the others aren't also doing specialist music and are often a full academic year older) she never receives a single merit mark, where others do.
She does care about this, especially as a new child to the independent school system, where these things seem to matter. In her old school you basically got showered with merits for not throwing chairs, but getting into the national children's orchestra and choir got no recognition at all - but at this school the criteria seem very different.
I asked her tutor what she should do to get a merit (which was a bit 'that parent' of me, but I haven't emailed him for six months and then it was about vaccinations so I'm not normally like that). He replied.
"I can assure you that there is absolutely nothing x is doing wrong! I suspect the unfortunate truth is that x operates at an exceptional level in all areas so consistently, that perhaps staff forget to recognise this because it has become the norm for their experience of x. My experience as a tutor is that, generally, I see merits given to pupils who have performed better than normal more than I see them given to those such as x, who perform outstandingly all of the time. Unfortunately for x what I think this may have meant is that her count of merits don't give her the credit she deserves."
Now this is all very well, but she still feels she's a bit rubbish and these kids who get merits are all over the very shiny newsletter, assembly, etc etc ALL the time. They are loud, and swishy-haired, and DD2 really feels it.
Academically and musically, she's fine - predicted all 8-9s etc. But she really feels like the 'state school mouse' who gets ignored.
Should I say something more, or is it just that she has to suck it up?
Sorry, that's an essay! But any help v gratefully received!