to expect a secondary school French teacher to know French?

[bonbonours]

DD1 just started year 7, having learnt French since toddlerhood as I teach it. Obviously she is finding she knows a lot of the French she is being taught at school which is fine.
She brought home a piece of homework where they had to match phrases in English and French, and in two of the phrases it used the word porte and the English it was supposed to match with was window. DD1 knows porte means door but she is not brave enough to say so to her teacher.

Should I be THAT mum and make a comment about it? Her French teacher is German which is a bit odd, but I assumed she also spoke fluent French. I'm now not so sure....

My daughter is bilingual and I am a languages teacher (native speaker of the language I teach)
She has sometimes come home and said "Miss X said" and it will be wrong.
Would I ever go in and point it out? Nope. Because it would make me look an insufferable know it all, and it would humiliate the teacher.
I think, OP, you know that this teachers knows porte/fenetre. It was a slip up. If your daughter were to come home and say "we asked Miss how to say window and she said "porte", fair enough.

PS I would also imagine, at least if French teaching in Germany is comparable to English teaching in Germany then she was doing at High School what we were all doing at tail end of university, so I'd think very carefully before trying to get one up on her.

Presumably you were an extremely self-possessed 11 year old perfectly capable of criticising adults in positions of responsibility?

Well I could put my hand up in class

Purple daisies yes I appreciate that, but 6 year olds in my French classes know the words porte and fenetre. It's hardly high level stuff....

I did 3 years French before dropping it, my 'Finch' teacher was actually a German teacher waiting for the existing German teacher to retire. His French was crap, even we, the bottom set knew that.

That was 40+ years ago and I know the difference between porte and fenetre.

I think it is probably best to go sown the 'Miss I htink there was a typo' route though.

There are ways of doing things politely without it coming across as criticism. Teach your daughter how to do that.

I'm a university lecturer. I had a massive blooper in a lecture the other day which a student pointed out . It's not because I am incompetent, mistakes happen.

Just send a wee non urgent note to the teacher saying - just to let you know there’s a mistake on that worksheet from last week - door/window mixup :)
Either by email direct if you have emails or via the office marked fao mrs whoever.

I’m sure it’s been mentioned already (not rtft) but could it be that the teacher usually teaches just German but has been pushed into teaching French even though she’s not proficient in it? Lots of secondary school teachers in our area are forced to teach a subject they have very little knowledge in due to recruitment issues in certain subjects.

Or maybe it was just human error and she had a scrambled brain day when creating the sheet.

Either way, I would encourage your dd to either correct it on the sheet or approach the teacher.

Fucks sake. Why is everyone excusing this?

If a chemistry teacher told a child the wrong name for a chemical would that be OK? A periodic table with mistakes in it?
An incorrect formula in physics?

MFL are not the only teachers having to teach different subjects. Several years ago my brother had to teach history for a year to ks3. He teaches a practical and creative subject usually. Luckily he is diligent and worked on his history knowledge keeping a few weeks ahead of his class. It wouldn’t have been ok to get the name of a queen wrong. Or to get the dates of a war wrong.

I haven’t done French for 30 yrs but I would know porte was wrong.

As an aside - one of dds friends speaks Spanish at home. She is born here but parents came her as adults. Some of the words she uses differ to the ones taught by their Spanish teacher. Is it because she is using colloquial or regional phrases? Or is it that the kids are taught formal, out of date language. Like ‘Good Morrow’ or ‘Good day’ instead of hello for instance.

i would mention it to the teacher - my daughter is learning spanish, french and mandarin and its so important to the the foundations right before they move on to the harder stuff. If the foundations are built on the wrong words/pronounciations then everything goes wrong.

Fucks sake. Why is everyone excusing this?

Because it is evident that it is almost definitely just a typo.

If she had stood up in front of the class and pointed to a window and said 'kids, the French for window is porte, I am absolutely right about that and don't let anyone else tell you differently' then that might be a bit more worrying. A typo on a homework sheet, not so much.

Thanks for responses.

It's not a typo, the same mistake occurs twice on the same quiz in two different sentences. The task was to match the English phrases to the French phrases. Two of the phrases are "Can I open the window?" and "Can I close the window" and in both the French 'matching' phrases the word porte is used for window. None of the other phrases have anything to do with doors, they are things like "Can I take my blazer off"

It may well be a mistake as in they changed their mind about whether to use door or window and forgot to change the French, rather than the teacher doesn't know the difference. However, given this is on a quizlet test the kids have been told to practice online at home, this error is potentially being reinforced and learnt by the whole class, many of whom will not have done French before.

I have emailed (politely) to point out the error, saying I'm sure it is just an oversight, but didn't like to think of the kids learning it wrong.

I downloaded some worksheets from the teacher resources on the TES site to send into school with my DD when she was at primary. Her teacher had suggested I could send her with her own work at that point for one specific subject, and I thought she could follow the UK curriculum for that subject. The quality of the resources was terrible though! More effort had been put into attention grabbing illustrations and cartoons than into content, and the writing was riddled with SPaG mistakes and factual errors and contradictory statements. I totally understand that it's easy to make mistakes "live" or when writing informally or in a hurry, but those were work sheets uploaded to a resource sharing site, along with comments on how well the lessons had gone down with their class etc! You'd have thought the mistakes would have been picked up once actually using the material with a class, and corrected before sharing the resources!

I am primary and like everyone else I now use Twinkl for pretty much everything But pre Twinkl I used to use TES and Primary Resources quite a lot and was shocked at some of the appalling resources on there. Riddled with mistakes and some of the activities were just so....crap.

I used to think 'wow, not only did you actually use this with your own class, you actually thought other people would want to use it!'

Of course there was loads of great stuff on there as well, and I never made the effort to put up any of my own resources (which of course were always amazing and error free ) so I shouldnt really complain, but sometimes.......

Even if it's a typo rather than a mistake, the OP should point it out. Her DD might know that porte =/= window but the rest of the class don't.

I have emailed (politely) to point out the error, saying I'm sure it is just an oversight, but didn't like to think of the kids learning it wrong.

Cool, done

its surely the highest form of mansplaining to teach a secondary school French teacher the correct translation of window and door.

But they got it wrong!! What the hell has that got to do with 'mansplaining?

This must be one of the daftest things I've read on here.

Let it go. As most are saying on here, it's a typo

Presumably not all the children know this...

Well done OP. Interesting to see what response you get.

I'm an MFL teacher. I think the chances that the teacher actually doesn't know that porte = door are very very slim. It may not be a typo exactly, but it may well be that when she was making the quiz she originally intended to use window, but changed her mind to door, or vice versa, but forgot to change the corresponding translation.

I certainly wouldn't be making a fuss about that one word unless anything similar happened again. It's true that there is a shortage of MFL teachers though. I have twice been employed by schools to teach some Spanish in addition to my French and/or German. I barely even speak holiday Spanish and have never had a Spanish lesson in my life.

We have the same problem with our English teacher (foreign language as we are abroad). She says things like "Listen at me, children" - which DS now says at home to wind us up. She also wrote up a list of eight job titles to learn - 3 of them were written wrongly. I am keeping out of it but DS pointed out the spelling mistakes - as a result, she marked him down in his last test. He got 7/10 despite making no mistakes....

Allegretto- I am fortunate in that I teach the son of dd's teacher, so it's all very quid pro quo with us on that front!

You know it tends to be the case, OP, that when basic vocabulary is being learnt, the words will be revised at regular intervals. I very much doubt that the teacher is making the “error” during all those many opportunities for revision.

I'm a university lecturer. I had a massive blooper in a lecture the other day which a student pointed out blush. It's not because I am incompetent, mistakes happen

Me too. I used a word which meant the exact opposite of the word I meant - like 'antenatal' instead of 'postnatal,' for example. It was a stupid mistake I made in typing: I do know what the words in question mean.

My DC are native speakers of a language taught in school. I tell them not to point out mistakes under any circumstances, unless the teacher asks them directly if something is correct. And especially not to point out mistakes to fellow pupils.

The kids are frequently taught odd mistakes but overall the standard is okay. There's no point in undermining a teacher who is doing her best. It's rude and would only lead to other pupils not taking MFL seriously. The teachers tend to ask DC for their input when needed/wanted anyway.

OP, personally I'd put it down to a typo and move on.

As an aside - one of dds friends speaks Spanish at home. She is born here but parents came her as adults. Some of the words she uses differ to the ones taught by their Spanish teacher. Is it because she is using colloquial or regional phrases? Or is it that the kids are taught formal, out of date language. Like ‘Good Morrow’ or ‘Good day’ instead of hello for instance.

Kids are taught good morrow?! Dying! :D

Spain has Castilian as an 'official' language, with multiple dialects (see recent events in Catalonia) elsewhere. South American Spanish has totally different words for certain items, a bit like American English uses sidewalk etc. This varies massively from country to country. We teach Castilian in U.K schools. So yes, she's using words she hears at home and probably having to re-learn the 'official ' word. Sorry if I'm teaching grandma to suck eggs here!

Saying that, all the textbooks teach 'mother/father' as opposed to mum/dad.