Incandescent with rage!

[Dawndonnaagain]

Just got dds school report, it's good, in the main, which we expected, but she is a worker. Now, some of you know that dd is an intelligent, hardworking, articulate woman, so please take note, those that don't!
She has had difficulty with her German lessons all the way through AS level. Not so much the lessons as the lack of tuition, she has two hours teacher contact time per week, for AS level! The teacher continually tells her that she won't make it. She leaves her ridiculous amounts of work to do in the scheduled lesson times, as well as homework. I have had enough and hired a private tutor. Said tutor has pointed out that a) not enough contact time, b) her pupils finished the book that dd is on (chapter three) before christmas, c) The school teacher's corrections needed correcting, d) with enough tuition dd can achieve a c this year and a b next. I know the woman tutoring, she taught ds for four years at a different school.
Now, despite the fact that dd is doing everything asked of her and more, fucking bitch has given her a satisfactory for effort and a bit of a slagging off. I am writing to the governors about the lack of teacher contact time, the fact that the report is grossly unfair, and the fact that it's not even written properly. Any suggestions welcome.

NurseyWursey

If you think it is acceptable to refer to your daughters teacher as a "fucking bitch" in front of her then that is very sad indeed. Teachers have a hard enough job as it is.

Did the school explain the contact time before the start of the course?

I.e. yes, we'll offer it for one student but it will be 2 hrs of 1 on 1?

The amount of contact time is not in the teacher's control. Timetabling is done in September. 2 lessons a week is not unusual at AS.

Yes, the timetabling is not up to the teacher. But how she spends those 2 hours is and it doesn't sound like she's doing much teaching.

She didn't swear at the teacher. She did it on here. I can't see the big deal.

It is bloody awful when an A level subject teacher is so bad that you have to supplement your child's learning with a tutor. I know some people choose to and that is fair enough but it doesn't sound like Dawn has a choice if she wants to get her dd through her A levels.

broken
1)Try reading the thread, dear. I did not swear at the teacher.
2) Dd has Asperger syndrome, so no, she's not able to sort it herself.

Buffy. You're right, I don't have a choice. I also think it's indicative of a wider problem when the school have agreed to implement the private tutor's lesson plans, rather than the internal teachers (lack of) plan.

Buffy Ds2 at a Russell Group Northern Uni. The support is phenomenal, really can't fault it in anyway whatsoever. He is getting steady firsts, so their investment will be repaid. He has AS with co-morbids.

I STILL have nightmares about my German A-level nearly 15 years on!! I wake up in a cold sweat thinking about it...

I'm not an educational expert and can only talk about my experience of being a student. I found that the only thing that really helped was to set aside 3/4 hour every single day without fail and master a concept in grammar and learn a bit of vocab. I found it much more difficult than my other subjects, which came more naturally with much less discipline! I don't regret learning a language at all, but I think if I were struggling with health problems on top, I would be tempted to swap to a different subject that I found a bit easier...

struggling I can see where you're coming from, but equally, being told No, at every turn makes you a very determined person! She wouldn't give it up for the world, she wants to study Lit at Cambridge, German is very useful for Lit.

I can understand your frustration at what is happening and i think having a good vent on here with some choice swearing is probably a good thing before you actually physically meet with anyone from school , because incandescent with rage is never a good look

tillytelltale any reccomendations for gcse level german texts , this thread really makes me want to have another bash at German . When you have finished your essay obviously

Dawndonnaagain - that's a fantastic attitude, good for her! And it is very useful for lit. I used my German to get out of Anglo-Saxon on that course!!

I would be angry too tbh. My dds are much younger but it sounds like your dd should be getting top marks for effort. Obviously it's not the teachers fault the timetable is so tight. However I would see it as the teachers duty to make the most of every minute of those lessons and not use them for marking. The time constraints in fact make it more important. It's also a teachers job to explain the bits a student doesn't understand.

brokenhearted55a
BTW at uni in my second year I had 2 hours a week contact time in one term.

And I can pretty much guarantee it was not a language degree. Like it or lump it, the fact that she is doing a language A-level, not General Studies or Critical Thinking is relevant.

If she was at a brick university doing German, far from having one lecture a term, she would be expected to go abroad to Germany for an entire year of the course.

As an Open University student, I myself get more than two hours a term. The last time I was allocated two hours a week for German was during the GCSE. The year after, the college increased the time allocation to three hours, because the head of modern languages said delivering a language GCSE in two hours a week was too difficult.

Ah, here's the LSE's MFL programmes which formpart of a undergraduate degree.

The LSE was the first one to come up when I googled "contact hours for language degree"
How much teaching will I receive?

For the intensive programmes Language and Society 1 & 2, classes start in week 1 of term. Language Society 3, 4 & 5 run along the lines of other LSE degree option (Lectures start week 1, classes in week 3).

Language and Society 1 (Beginner): 6 hours per week [Tilly's notes: for ab initio students- looks roughly GCSE equivalent]
Language and Society 2 (Intermediate): 5 hours per week [Tilly's notes: AS-level/A2 level]
Language and Society 3 (Advanced): 4 hours per week [Tilly's notes: labelled B2 Vantage, so a blend of A2-level/first year undergraduate]
Language and Society 4 (Proficiency): 3 hours per week [Tilly's notes: labelled C1- conventional language degree level]
Language and Society 5 (Mastery): 2 hours per week [MA in languages]

6 hours! I wish!
Oh, and I have just spoken to ds who has opted for Japanese at uni this semester, and guess what, he's never done it before and he's got five hours!

And here's a brochure from Bath for their language degree. Read the students' descriptions carefully

I'm not going to even mention the Oxbridge workload here. Just knowing about their workload each week makes me feel stressed... The amount of work within this book is, erm, ample, and they don't just study grammar.

Perhaps I should have already stopped flogging this deceased equine in particular, but the only alternative to an infodump was making a youtube clip of myself being extremely sarcastic.

Dawndonna and Daughter of Dawndonna

Wort für Wort is a very good book. I second that suggestion. Congratulations, again, for picking German. When I was your age (oh god, I'm turning into my mother) I had the choice to study German, and I very much wanted to, but I convinced myself that my issues meant it would be a waste of time, and that I was too rubbish to even pass a GCSE.

Stating the Obvious About Sensory Issues
Firstly, I should describe my difficulties, so that you can start calculating whether there's any possibility whatsoever they will be relevant to you.

My actual hearing is perfect, according to hearing tests. My family would attest that it is over-sensitive, and insist that normally, people don't find it physically painful to have an MP3 player above 8 on a scale ranging from 1 to 31!

However, even after a lifetime of being an English monoglot, I constantly mishear what people say in English, and my mind seems to fill in the blanks of what I heard. The substitutions for the words I didn't hear often make as much sense as the substitutions made on an online Tesco order, but I am convinced until corrected that I heard the nonsense! I cannot reliably retain complex information if aurally presented. I also have the subtle legacy of a (untreated by professionals) set of speech problems from childhood, which probably developed in part due to the processing issues in the first place. In short, I'm one of those irritating people who says three as free and I can't hear the difference. I should not be a languages student!

In German, I develop an additional problem where even if I manage to hear the words clearly, I'm not fluent enough to connect them with a meaning, spoken out loud. (I once, during an exam, replayed a section and wrote a word down, and then realised what it meant!) Lack of fluency accentuates a pre-existing issue of hearing all the individual words, but not being able to comprehend what they all mean as a whole.

I wibbled my way up from a U on mocks for the listening comprehension portion of the exam (I was on AQA) by making myself very familiar with all the vocabulary written down and heard, in order to give both my unthinking mind and thinking mind a chance.

I used Duolingo, because that has dictation exercises.

Then I went through our entire DVD collection, looking for DVDs that had language options, and watched things with the German dubbing switched on. This is a bit confusing because frequently the dubbing and subtitling were done independently, and they don't match. If you have DVDs with German dubbing, watch them with English subtitling on, otherwise you will be straining to hear sounds that aren't there. The mismatch between the mouths of the actors speaking English lines, and the German coming out of the telly speakers is bad enough, and you do pick up that subconsciously, even if you're not a lip-reader.

Authentic German television series and films have far more reliable subtitling, but you have to peruse Amazon.de very carefully to find ones that come with subtitling. They don't seem to be as disability-friendly. That, or the team which fills in the details on Amazon's German site is incompetent and leaves things out.

Next I watched Euronews (on Virgin cable, it's number 620) with the German voiceover switched on and the Tagesschau each day. www.tagesschau.de/ If you have a Sony blu-ray player connected to the internet, it's an automatic option available there, too.

And finally, but by no means least (quite the opposite) was www.listenlive.eu/. Webradio, sorted by country. After you've forced yourself to listen to DeutschlandRadio Kultur every evening for a couple of months, the speakers on the listening comprehension sections of the papers seem to be speaking so sloooooooooooowly. And for lighter listening, I have quite a fondness for Antenne Bayern Hits für Kids!

P.S. Don't feel demotivated if you can't follow the conversation on DeutschlandRadio Kultur after two months. That is a very, very long-term goal, and it's at a vastly higher level than A-level exams.