On the rare occasions that my DCs (twins aged 10) bring home exercise books for different subjects, I notice that there are past HWs that remain unmarked, from weeks ago. There are blank or unfinished pages (eg in physics or biology) where the teacher has written "finish this off" but DCs haven't done so and seem to be unaware of it or have been given no clear instructions about when and how to finish things off. Finally, in DC1's English exercise book, there are lots of errors that haven't been flagged up by the teacher - eg spelling/ grammar, even when a piece of work is marked.
I appreciate that teachers have masses of work to do and that if they have tons of marking to do, things can get unnoticed. Also, it must be difficult to go over each child's book and check what they've not finished and get the child to finish the work.
I have a parents evening tomorrow night. This is feedback from some important recent exams that helped the school decide which children they will support into the senior school. Both my DCs has made it through this hurdle but both are struggling in maths and one is struggling in English. The one having problems in English is the one with several mistakes unmarked in his book and also the teacher seems to use a lot of what I'd call 'slang' in any feedback comments he makes in the exercise book.
This DC also has lots of maths HW unmarked and he's too scared himself to draw attention to that fact (frightened of maths teacher). but as he spends about an hour and more on maths HW, struggles with it and scored below the year average in the exams, I'm worried that he's not being helped in the way I'd hope.
Should I flag up my concerns about unmarked or incompletely marked work or should I just focus on how best to help both DC improve?
I'm aware that my own schooling ended 30 yrs ago and so i come from the era when every single grammatical or spelling error would be indicated and where, if you had HW - it'd definitely be marked. If you had missed a class for any reason, the work you'd missed would be given to you or you'd be asked to borrow someone else's book to copy it up.
DCs (both boys) at age 10 are too young to monitor all this themselves, I think but the exercise books don't come home enough for me to be able to keep tabs on this. So some of the science work they were supposed to revise for recent exams, for eg, wasn't even there!
I am really struggling myself to pay the school fees and I suppose this fact and the fact that DCs didn't do all that well (although did do well enough) in the recent exams may be colouring my views and exacerbating my dissatisfaction. If both were achieving their full potential, then perhaps I'd feel less nitpicking.....so thought I'd post on here for more objective views.