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....

Update, I had an email back from the teacher, thanking me for pointing out the mistake and confirming she has changed it.

Good result. You must have phrased it well.

Good OP.
You must have gone down the reasonable and diplomatic route.

And in today's news...

Teacher turns out to be reasonable human after all.

Who knew.

As a MFL graduate, it's disheartening to see the state of language teaching in the UK. Of course the teacher should know something so basic! Imagine the outcry if this were maths...

I am very lucky to be a Maths teacher in a fully staffed Maths department. Most Secondaries struggle to recruit Maths teachers and all sorts of non-specialists have to teach it. I've worked with Head of Science teaching Maths, many PE teachers teaching Maths (particularly stuck in with Y7), in my children's school many classes have long term supply, in my last school I was the only qualified Maths teacher and spend my time rotating around the 3 Y11 GCSE classes. Happens all the time...............what can you do about it, not a lot apart from make a fuss, help your kids at home or get a tutor.

To add - do you think those non subject specialist teachers want to do it? They have no choice, in a secondary school you are employed as a 'teacher' and the school can basically ask you to teach whatever they want - most end up doing it just to keep their job. There is an abundance of PE teachers but not Maths.

I always corrected the teachers mistakes in my mother tongue. It doesn’t have to be offensive. I tended to put it on a post it so it could be removed and there was no permanent record. They knew they were teaching my language and never seemed to mind. They are probably nervous about the situation anyway.

Random anecdote; when I was at university, one of our French teachers, (who was French), marked my whole French language class wrong for spelling Irak with a k at the end in some coursework. I think she actually chuckled and said something like, "it's so funny that you've all made the same spelling mistake". This was at a decent university as well.

Anyway, glad the teacher has realised the mistake.

Good outcome, glad you pointed it out to her.

Yoyoyo - in my 1st year at University, all our year had to do basic catch up science in all 3 areas, in case we'd missed stuff at A levels. In the chemistry lecture, I was bemused to see that the lecturer had the symbol for Barium as B (instead of Ba) and the symbol for Boron as Bo (instead of B). I admit, I did put my hand up and query it. Not in a "sir sir you've got it wrong", but "um, just checking, I thought that the symbol B stood for Boron, not Barium?" type of way. Anyway, he corrected it there and then and didn't seem put out at all. All was well and 100 or so students didn't go on their way confused about the chemical symbols for boron and barium.

I am an insufferable knowitall though - my parents used to call me that as a child.

Fgs note in journal dear msfrench teacher just to let you know there is a misprint on sheet with porte incorrectly translated as window. Job done in a pleasant way.

Bernard black Irak is spelt Iraq in French.

jamais

No it isn't.

www.collinsdictionary.com/translator

I think Iraq can be understood and is used by some, but the accepted spelling (used by Le Monde etc) is Irak afaik.

mobile.lemonde.fr/moyen-orient-irak/

^^the 'irak' section from Le Monde.

Interesting, thank you!

Is this the only example of her 'not knowing french' since your dd started with her?

It's probably just a mistake! The teacher, probably knackered, put window instead of door (maybe she was thinking about windows and wrote it in error)

Bring it up with her but I wouldn't accuse her of not speaking French.