to think teachers form opinion of pupil based on older siblings

[whattodonow1]

just my older brother used to skive school, get caught smoking, do no homework. When I jóined the school 3 years later I always felt the teachers had a negative perception of me even though I was completely different.

Your, sorry, in second para. not our.

I'm usually rubbish at realising they're related. I have often been surprised when I've eventually worked it out!

YABU to asume all teachers do! I don't! I am a teacher and don't do this... Although sometimes teachers further up the school will say "oo you're getting X's little sister next year... Good luck with her as he is a right handful" type of thing. Although I always try and judge a child on their own merits :o

I used to get dragged into my twin brothers class room in Infants and told "why can you not be like your twin brother?" Even in senior school they compared me to my 4 brothers who had passed through the school at various stages or were still there. Thankfully I like to think now we're not in the 1970's/ 80's things have improved somewhat

If they do still work like that, they will have a surprise this September, because my DD is angelic and my son who is beginning below her, is a Tasmanian devil

my dd2 has her sisters name written in her books, the teahcer has made a comment about the work and written the older sisters name - this really isn't good.

dd1 is 6 years older than dd2 and dd1 only went to dd2s school for sixth form

Ooh I did my sociolgy coursework on labelling theory. I found one sentence in one book that said that teachers often interpret behaviour of younger siblings in light of their older siblings. So not exactly labelled, but definitley something at work there.

yes, we do it but we try really hard not to.

From my experience, yes they do. At least initially. I like to think that after a couple of terms the teachers have cottoned on that they are actually different people though ;)

DS1 has ADHD and ASD and as such, could sometimes be a challenging student and certainly stood out in his class. DS2 is NT and 2 school years behind DS1, so when their Primary school started mixing year groups it meant that Miss X would have DS1 for 2 years, followed straight on by having DS2 for the next 2 years. Most of DS2's school reports had to be sent back to be corrected as they switched between names, parent teacher meetings went much the same way with the usual "oh 2 is really quite easy going isn't he?" comments at the first one. He is, but not more so than most kids, so the teacher was obviously expecting him to be more high maintenance because DS1 was.

In an accidental social experiment ;) I have tested this theory. We recently moved areas and schools and DS1 is in Seniors now while DS2 still has a year at Juniors. This is the first time DS2 has been in a school that hasn't had DS1 first, so he can be judged purely on his own merits (or lack thereof at times ;) ) and all of a sudden he is being described as lively, confident and outgoing. Previously the same behaviour from him was described as hyper, boorish and outspoken. Of course a lot of that may be due to different schools and teachers, but I do think a lot of it is down to him not being in his brothers shadow and the teachers not having preconceptions about him based on his brother.

This is one of the key reasons DS2 is going to a different senior school to his brother in September. Academically they are pretty equal, he has friends going to both, they are equidistant from the house but one will see him be known as DS1's little brother and one will know him just as DS2.

It was the other way round when I was a kid. My sister was 4 years ahead of me, so at seniors we had the same head of year and form teachers. She was a swot and a teachers pet. Library monitor, sound effects crew for the school plays, played in the brass band, the works. All through school I kept hearing "why aren't you more like DSis? DSis always handed her homework in on time/didn't talk back/wasn't caught once a week bunking over the gates to go to the shop for fags"

Yes both me and my younger brother were judged by some teachers due to our half sisters behaviour. The worst thing was punching her Maths teacher.

One of the teachers didn't want to teach me in case I was like her. Luckily I wasn't.

Only one teacher did this to me. My brother was/is an outstanding pianist. The day I started at the senior school, the head of music called me in, asked me to play the piano, I was puzzled but did so in my poor manner. And he turned angrily at me and said 'You are nothing like x', and I was like 'No I know', "OUT" and never spoke to me again for the 6 years I was there.

Yes. It happens. I have a friend who has a son at the local senior school. He is erm, a handful, shall we say.

Her daughter is a few years younger and is a sweet thing, hard working and not a bit of trouble (only to her mum )

When she started at this school, the first thing the teachers all asked was was she Xs sister.

Then it started.

Trouble in class - she got told off, group of kids talking - she got told off.

My niece is her friend and she reported so many times when this girl was nowhere near an incident and yet was somehow held responsible for it

They had her marked down as trouble, just because her brother is. And she was treated very unfairly.

She had to prove to them that she wasn't him. They certainly didn't approach her with an open mind. It was guilty until she proved herself innocent.

It was awful.

We had an extreme version of this when DS2 started secondary. Bizarre parents' evenings at which they'd say 'Well, as a child on the autistic spectrum,...' and I'd say 'That's his brother, actually.'

[No,DS2 isn't autistic. He's odd in his very own way, but not that.]

Luckily my DS1 and DS2 have had different teachers so far. But DS2 and DD are in consecutive school years and there's been a bit of calling the younger by the elder's name - there's 4 of them in the same situation and the others are all same-sex identical looking siblings...

My brother is not academic and we are not competitive so that was ok.

DSIS got the short end of this.
1st day of secondary "Oh no! there aren't anymore of you are there?"

Unfortunately I'm academic, but eccentric and very prone to ignore the rules. Every pupil and teacher in the 1000+ school probably vaguely recognised me by the time she joined. I have a very common fore name and a very rare, but easy to pronounce surname. She had no escape.

She was the sort of exactly average child who really would have appreciated an easy life.

I have had one comment in planner "boy1 read very well today!". Trouble was, it was written in boy2's planner.

You can almost forgive them though as they are in the same class, only one school year different and small village primary.

Oh yes, my brother was a teachers dream. Bright, quiet, polite, a lovely, lovely boy as I was told on a daily basis

Kicked cheesy in the shins a fair bit hearing 'you're not a bit like your brother are you ?' time and time again.

Even worse their's 13 sodding years between us, the blonde haired, blue eyed genius had obviously been held up as some sort of pariah. I had no chance, I went to a different ( junior ) school in the end thank gawd.

We've had this with ds and 2. They no longer go to that school.
Ds1 is borderline AS, highly intelligent and very very intense. Ds2 is an normal nt bright outgoing kid but suffers for ds1s 'crimes'. We will see how the new school copes with it as of september.
i have noticed the more they put ds1 onto ds2 the more he plays up to it. Also very much as Pious said, put them together and ds2 is over the top and silly, seperate them them in peoples minds and suddenly hes funny and bubbly

I think it definitely used to be the case that siblings were compared to each other, I was certainly compared to my older sibling (one year apart) enough to warrant out parents putting our younger sibling into the other primary in the area. But my kids are treated very much as individuals and I do wonder if the new generation of teachers (my peers as it were) are more conscious to treat children as individuals and nurture those differences.

YANBU. I got so fed up hearing "your brother can do it, why can't you?" I turned round one day and shouted "I don't have a penis".

It took a meeting between my mother and the head to get the school to treat me as an individual.

Do feel like going back to those teachers that did tar us with the same brush and let them know an update on our lives now and then maybe they'll realise we were different then and we're very different now!.

At primary the DDs don't seem to have a problem. DD2's teacher had dyslexic socially inept DD1 for 3 years (jobshares & mixed yeargroups). I think DD2 must come as a blessed relief.

Had they been born the other way round, we might have had problems.

When siblings are nothing like each other we are just as likely to notice! I can think of a boy with behaviour problems (excluded a couple of times) whose younger sister is a really well behaved, friendly little girl. Would NEVER judge her by her older brothers. I try really hard to be fair despite what some of the naughtier kids think.

My dd had a teacher who thought the sun shone out of her backside - she could do no wrong. The same teacher had my ds two years later, and after a couple of months in her class, she commented (quite disappointedly) that he was nothing like his sister, 'what a pity'.

I found out from my ds that she had made various nasty comments to him along those lines, and to other children who's sibs she'd previously taught.

I can understand why teachers get names wrong, and to a certain extent why they make assumptions about students based on siblings, BUT as a younger sister to a very intelligent, hard working girl I wish they'd keep their assumptions to themselves (there's three years between us).

At the end of a lesson two weeks into the school year (having only just started the subject) I had an A-Level teacher (in a subject my DSis didn't even do at school, but did meet the teachers a few times because she ended up doing it at uni) pull me to one side to tell me "I'm expecting great things from you". I looked puzzled, and he said "well, your DSis is doing very well at uni, isn't she? So I'm expecting equally great things from you". To this day I don't know what came over me, but my reaction was to...
Flash him a scathing look, say "Well then you're going to be disappointed, because unfortunately I'm not my sister", turn on my heel and walk out of his classroom.

He was horrific. I took great delight in doing consistently badly in his class, but doing very well in the classes the other teacher took.