To be annoyed at this teacher regarding parents evening?

[Blownspeakersandvolcanos]

My dd is is in year 9 and had a parents evening tonight which she came along to.

When it was our turn to approach her art teacher, he had to ask dd what her name was again.

There was an instance in his class where she asked him for a fresh piece of paper and he had a go at her because he had assumed she had come in from the classroom next door and should have therefore asked her teacher

I get in secondary school that you obviously teach many children, but he also taught her during year 7 too.

I just didn't want to listen to his report on her because he doesn't seem to have a clue who she was!

Also, the comparison to banking is, in my opinion, a bit facetious. You are in a client-facing role where it is a core part of your job to talk to clients one-to-one; of course you get to know them better than a teacher presenting to a class of 30 for part of an hour and then supervising them on project work, then doing that again four or five more times that day. It is unreasonable to expect you to name 500-600 people by sight, as others have pointed out.

Why are you writing your complaints on here instead of saying them to the teacher?

trifle you are 100% correct.

Raspberry sometimes I forget to put effort marks on the system immediately after a lesson, so I put them in for a subsequent lesson. I do try to check that a student receiving a credit was actually present for that lesson, since it would look more than odd, but one or two may have slipped through.

Trifle - is your math saying that a student only has any given class once a week? So a teacher teaches 5 classes a day of 30 students x 5 days a week?

I'm not in Britain, but that seems unlikely. My teenager has 4 classes a day, same classes every day of the week for half the school year. A teacher considers themselves hard done by in terms of workload if they have a full 4 classes (so around 120 students).

Taking maths or French once a week seems unlikely as a) a student would not be able to master a topic when visiting it so infrequently, b) students can hardly be taking 20-25 subjects at a time c) I doubt many schools offer 20-25 subjects per grade level.

But I'm not great at math so may have missed something here.

Op, the teacher sounds disorganized and should not shout at people about pieces of paper.

I have about 170 and do know all their names now but the first few months with the 2 first year classes are awful as you try to learn their names. (also agree with Noble about the placing being important) I taught our parish priest (now in his early 30s and could tell him where he sat in the room, yet I have 2 very similar looking girls I've taught for 3 yrs and I still have to look at one, then the other, to get which one I'm talking to)

DD has a teacher who after 3 years still confuses her with another girl in the class. This particular teacher is the music teacher- they have music for one hour a week, and the teacher has 19 classes. I forgive her.

Our parents don't have appts for parents' evening, so as they line up outside the door, it's a bit of a frantic "now who are you?" as they stride in.

On balance, I'd say there are more serious things to start an AIBU-teacher thread about tbh.

Vintage - so how many classes (subject matter areas) would a teenage student have in a school year then?

Where I live some kids take 4 classes a semester, two semesters a year so 8 subject areas a year. Age 17 that could range from Calculus to Mandarin to Physics to Cooking to Autoshop to English to Philosophy to History etc (my teenager chooses to take all academics and no arts not trades).

lizzieoak:

My maths is saying that because this is an art teacher, there probably is only one class per week per student in KS3.

I hope it is just because of the number of children being taught and because the OPs child is not disruptive or exceptional, nothing else. Forgetting names could be the start of ill-health, which I hope is not the case here.

Parents only at our school (DC have all grown up now).
After a particularly confusing evening when we left shell-shocked after being told DD was disruptive, had not handed in a single piece of homework and was heading towards suspension - none of it true - we made sure we took a photograph with us to subsequent Parent Evenings!

Thanks Trifle. Schools are run differently everywhere so just trying to understand. At that age my kids hard art 3x a week. That's a lot of students!

This is a little funny. Last year, Y9, I got told by my DS's spanish teacher, that he should be doing better verbally, because he speaks portugese at home. So she was moving him down because he wasn't trying hard enough - don't get me started on why she waited till PE to tell us there was a problem. Email's a great invention, Edmodo also a good way to reach out - however I digress.

Point is DS doesn't speak Portugese, but the other black kid in the class does. In fact DS is the only non-multi-lingual student in the higher group. Needless to say he didn't move and his new Y10 teacher does not appear to have a problem with his efforts.

At the time it felt like she was trying to shame him and it pee'd me off. But of course I couldn't say much to her with my DS sitting right there.

As PP have pointed out with a non core subject the teacher will only see the students once a week and there will be lots of KS3 classes.

I teach a non core subject and currently have 6 yr 7/8 classes (we have a 3 year KS4) so that means 180 students I see for 50 minutes a week so yes I struggle it doesn't help that I'm also terrible with names

lizzieoak

Yes, I teach 6 periods a day of different classes. As I said above, being a non core subject, I see one particular class one hour a week, so at Key Stage 3 it is so much more difficult (Key Stage 4 I see 4 classes a week x2 and 2 Key Stage 5 classes week x5 so I know them much better and much faster)

I'll repeat what I said above: I have 3 Year 7 classes, 2 Year 8 and 4 Year 9 classes that's 270 pupils without talking about my exam pupils. Per week. And you may find this hard to believe as you say you aren't in this country but we are not lying!

elephantoverthehill

The OP said this teacher taught her daughter in Year 7 and then in Year 9. That is not three consecutive years like you say and therefore, still perfectly reasonable to assume he made mistakes. It's a little easier in my class as I have fixed workstations so pupils don't move about in my lessons. Last night at PE, I forgot 3 pupils names (they all didn't come at their appointment times and one was one who didn't make an appointment but could I squeeze them in) out of 76 appointments so that's still pretty good odds in my opinion. In Art, pupils probably sit round big tables and get up and move around to use art supplies more often so it isn't as easy to use a seating plan to remember them (God knows what PE, Drama etc. teachers do-I would be a mess learning names in that environment!)

I'm a core subject teacher and this sometimes happens to me. I'm not great at remembering names. Sometimes the kids look remarkably similar and they all wear the same clothes. Shoot me.

Note to Lizzie, when it's an education thread, probably best not to begin I'm not in Britain !!

I teach a core subject and am a head of year. At parents' evenings I have to juggle the two classes per year group I teach, plus potentially impromptu appointments from any one of my year group of 420 students...at which point, as their esteemed head of year, I have to pretend I know them... This could be more appointments than actually fit the official slots so I think I could be forgiven for being a touch frazzled!

By the way, as well as being a head of year, I teach nine different classes Lizzie ...

although the only nice thing my line manager ever said to me was that I have an amazing capacity for recalling names , faces and events...

And it works the other way! One of my Year 13 students (am his Form Tutor-have taught him 5 days a week for the past two years) and he asked me how to spell my name! And pupils have so many teachers themselves, I can assure you they don't all know our names but get away with it mostly by using Sir or Miss. I have had countless students ask me their teachers name so they could send them an email

Ah, yes , very true Kitty. I am always asking students who their teachers are and their stock answer is they can't remember his/her name...They have far fewer teachers than we have students!

Ah ha. So that's why DD's school used to issue stickers for parents to wear with their children's names on

I never mentioned banking did I? I was just trying to take the emotion of it being about 'poor forgotten children', by using the term client to put the numbers into perspective as I don't think many parents will actually comprehend the sheer scale involved in a large school for a teacher of a non-core subject. Of course any parent is going to be upset or even angry that a teacher doesn't remember their precious DC's name. I would.

This wasn't a problem back in the day when pupils didn't come to parents night as you could just ask the parent who they were.

If I have a blank at the face or am at all unsure if it's Olivia or Sophia from the third row, I usually ask them what their time was again just to double check against my appointment list. The online registers are good until you work in a school with old lap tops and no power close enough - ours won't even print unless you take loads of screen shots.

I've yet to be in one of these amazing schools with strict appointments/bells, always had walk ups if they spot a gap.

And in the worst case scenario, I've just discussed the child (as with them in front of me I do always know them just not always 100% their name) in the second person, directed to the child too and tell the parents what they need to know about what we are doing in class. Not great, or my proudest professional moment.

I found this was only really a problem in my first or second year teaching in a new school when I was hit with a few hundred faces in one go in September. A few years in it gets much easier as you already know a proportion of each new class except Year 7.

On the other hand, last year I was stressfully wrangling my way through an airport with small children, dealing with stuff in another language when out of nowhere I hear a "hi miss x" I turned and without missing a beat said "Hi Emily" and was straight into conversation with (a now grown up and changed) former KS3 pupil. Completely out of context. When she left I could tell DH about a specific assignment of hers I remembered. There are 1000s of names and faces imprinted forever on my brain. It's weird how the memory works.

No, someone else mentioned banking who has now seen the light!

Badhot Yes I assumed it was something like that and didn't raise it as i didn't want to look petty/like i was trying to make her look silly. I probably would have asked about it if it was a behaviour point though.

Dd didn't know the name of her new trainee teacher and said it was because they just call her Miss. She says things like "Miss said to do so and so."
I do find it funny when we go to parent information meetings and the teachers tell parents to collect a sheet from "Sir" but I assume it's because they are tired/used to saying it all day and obviously am grateful for them holding the meeting etc.

Ha, yes, I'm relatively new to my school and I don't know all of the staff's names to faces yet (there's over 100 teachers), so often address them directly and to kids as Miss or Sir!
Equally, in staff meetings, we'll refer to parents like, 'so I phoned mum and she informed me that...'

My brain is just tired. Teaching is pretty intensive.