DDs teacher giving serious misinformation WWYD?

[phantomnamechanger]

How to deal with this please......

DD has recently got a new English teacher. They are reading Pride & Prejudice (just started). Today in the lesson, the teacher has on several occasions referred to it being set in "the Victorian era"
that's a massive error to make, right? how do we point this out? DD was like when she told me, but there will be other kids who believe the teacher and for whom that will stick.
DD did not want to correct the teacher for fear of being reprimanded/thought rude.
WWYD?

steppemum - not me , I only know what previously dino obsessed DS son insisted on telling me a bit about dinosaurs. He challenged his teacher on the time period that a particular dinosaur lived in and on the development of modern creatures from dinosaurs amongst other things.

I have to be honest and say that not always have I checked his views with research myself - I trusted him and his nit-picking obsession with dinosaurs and still do, that is not to say I don't pull him up on stuff I think/know he's wrong on - because that's how we learn, hearing/believing something, getting it challenged, providing evidence and/or reinforcing our belief or reevaluating it.

good for him sacreblue.

I think learning how to politely challenge someone in authority is a great life skill!

One of the whole points about JA is that she's not Victorian, surely? Saying 'oh she's part of the Victorian canon so counts' is wrong, wrong, wrong.

I am a English graduate and teacher and I think the teacher may be thinking 19th C = Victorian. On my degree course we did a module of the 19th century novel which went from Frankenstein to Tess, taking in Austen and Dickens on the way. If she did summat similar, that may be where her error lies.
Is she an English graduate? I know a couple of English teachers whose first degree was in drama.

I think she's done the classic thing of equating c.19th with Victorian, and that's not good.

Now there is indeed an ongoing and very interesting debate about whether Victorianists ought more properly consider themselves 'scholars of the nineteenth century', and whether 'Victorian' is a meaningful term to describe all the thought and literature produced while Victoria was on the throne. I don't get any sense here that the teacher is alluding to that, otherwise she would have surely made the point more explicit.

Not sure what you should say or how to say it, but it's good, OP, that your daughter at least knows the difference!

Me too steppemum baffles me why more people don't think it is.

That's really awful. How can you be study or teach English literature and not have a basic knowledge of historical eras?

I'm familiar with the idea of 'the long nineteenth century', but I'd never come across the term 'the long Victorian era' before reading this thread.Then I found this from the Historical Association, where it says, 'Strictly speaking, the Victorian era began in 1837 and ended with Queen Victoria's death in 1901, but the period can be stretched to include the years both before and after these dates, roughly from the Napoleonic Wars until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.'

This must be what signet has in mind. But is it a new orthodoxy, or a minority/contested view? A contention at university/research level, or more widely taught than that?

To me, it seems odd to wipe out the Regency and Edwardian periods at a stroke, especially in terms of literature. And especially at GCSE level.

OP, I'd do what several posters have suggested - suggest your daughter approaches the teacher one-to-one and asks her about dates/Regency period, etc.

Well done LRD are the corrections post Viva?

Anyway, I am doing a PhD encompassing the period 1860-1910. If forced to, I'd describe myself as a nineteenth-century historian, rather than a Victorian historian, as my period is covered by the long nineteenth century.

I can see how you might describe a house built in, say, 1830 as Victorian and be roughly right. Not accurate but fair enough.

But as another poster says, P&P is set in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars so a very different thing altogether. In fact iirc from my English o'level, it was always one of the criticisms of Jane Austen that she didn't reflect the external events of the time other than incidentally (soldiers popping up here and there). Stupid criticism imho but if you don't know what era she's writing in you won't know what it is she is, or is not, reflecting, and therefore won't be able to take a view on that criticism. So definitely an error that an English teacher should not make.

They are, yes.

Interesting to hear how you'd describe the period.

I am reminded of Michael Idiot Gove's views on period boundaries, though. He expressed shock that some children 'don't know' whether Romans, Vikings, Greeks or Egyptians 'came first'. That sort of stupid comment is what happens when people get too het up about fitting everything into neatly labelled chronological boxes.

I don't see the issue with saying it's long 19th century or whatever, but surely at GCSE you are best just to go with dates and be precise?

(and thanks!)

Definitely a Victorian=whole of the 19th century thing on the teacher's part, I think, but one huge problem is that "the Victorian novel" is a very different beast from anything Austen wrote in so many ways that it could set up huge problems for any pupils who want to take English Lit. beyond GCSE.

What's the syllabus for A Level these days? It used to be you'd do a modern novel, which I guess requires less historicizing - or more familiar historicizing because most of us know 20th century history reasonably well.

The Revolting peasant: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PrideandPrejudiceandZombiesCover.jpg

Aw brilliant!

Yes, for GCSE/A level/undergrad just describe it as what it is.

Thanks.

I'm teaching outside my period boundary this term, so that is reassuring to know.

Good luck! I am being let loose on undergrads for the first time this semester. Scary stuff.

Good luck! You'll be great.

I have second years. I'm looking foward to it.

I will endeavour not to teach then P&P is Victorian, and we'll all be fine.

Yes The Victorian Novel is different from a novel written in the Victorian period.

Why, ubik?

buffy - I've taught second year before. I liked it.

I've challenged teachers in the past when I was at school and still do so now that the dc are at school, albeit eldest is only in Y4.

Worst example so far - last year ds1 had to do a big project on inventors and come up with his own invention, then draw it, explain it, the problem that it overcame, etc etc. The person they chose to give as an example - Einstein. Who was not an inventor but a theoretical physicist. (although I do now know thanks to MN that he does have one small patent to his name along with one other person, but it's a pretty minor thing).

Worst part of it was that the teacher didn't really seem to see what the problem was when I asked her to clarify the homework and whether they wanted him to come up with an invention so not like Einstein. Or to come up with theoretical physics instead of an invention but be like Einstein. Doh! And - that the homework had been set by the head of the year so all the teachers in the year would have seen it and despite them teaching inventing/inventors as their topic for that half term, none of them had picked up on it before the homework was issued.

Einstein is the most over-cited example of so many things. It annoys me.