@Guymere: I’m a bit worried about choosing subjects based on nice teachers. They leave.
You think I don't know! I did successfully persuade her to take Geography rather than History for GCSE, because she is genuinely interested in Geography (climate change and it affects the animals) and not in History (people - which according to DD equals boring)- but at the time they were making the choices, the History teacher was nice, and the Geography teacher wasn't. Then the History teacher left and was replaced by one which wasn't so nice, still before GCSEs, which meant we were a bit more secure. And then the Geography teacher left and has been replaced by a brilliant one, and she is absolutely loving Geography, and now wants to do it for A Level.
In addition when you choose options at university you don’t know what the lecturer is like.
Agreed, as with the GCSE in fact. I know that, and she will probably know that, but the reality of university is that if you don't get on with the teacher, you can often swap within the first few weeks, even if it means studying something a bit different. It shouldn't be necessary for personality reasons, but I certainly am aware of people who were less focussed on what they wanted to study and did it.
Teachers have always moaned about the top set being not as good as they should be! It’s a throw away complaint. It’s not serious.
While I agree with most of what you have said, this one I am afraid I disagree with strongly. One of the things they keep showing is that, while boys will often take that as a challenge, girls lose confidence and conclude they are "not good at maths", and drop out. And I really see this in my own family. If anything, I think my DD is possibly stronger at maths than my DS, but there is no way she would be an A* A Level student in maths (as my DS is), and the major difference is that when a problem seems hard, it motivates my DS to find a solution, whereas my DD is more likely to give up. She doesn't believe she can, so she won't (if she needed maths to save the life of her beloved hamster, then you might find she was extraordinarily good at maths). Telling her that she is not good enough to be in set 1, just makes her believe that you are right, and therefore not to try very hard because she is not good enough to be tackling these problems. Given that this teacher is teaching a class of girls, I therefore think her comments are very distructive in terms of what she wants to achieve.
Teachers are not all the same temperamentally either.
Agreed.
Ditto university lecturers. In life not everyone is nice. I would try and get DD to see that the bark is worse than the bite.
I spend a lot of time trying (as mentioned, she comes home from school on the two days she has chemistry in tears). The reality is that she is so terrified of the bark, that she cannot take in anything at all in class. It is clearly ridiculous that a chemistry teacher makes them write the date in a foreign language (albeit one that DD is studying, although not all of them are, so in theory she should be one of the ones who doesn't find it difficult) and yells at them if they don't. But the whole thing just upsets DD so much that she cannot learn. That is the reality. Luckily she has a good set of friends in the set who are less thrown, and can tell her what the homework is, and then I can help her actually do it, and help with the notes that she is scared are not perfect and therefore she will be yelled at for. Just as teachers are not the same temperamentally, so are students, and my DD is a particularly nervy one, and the reality is that we need to work around this. DD will not voluntarily choose to do chemistry under this teacher. One option might be to move for sixth form, so she can do chemistry (in the hope that whatever chemistry teacher we speak to and check out might then stay for the two years necessary). But she will have two sciences - Biology and Geography, so it is only really the third (or fourth, if she takes photography outside of school, as she is currently doing for GCSEs).