How much sloppy work from the teacher should I tolerate before approaching the HT?

[Alliwantisaroomsomewhere]

DS is in Yr 3 at a good enough school! There have been 2 or 3 minor spelling or grammatical errors in homework tasks which I have (very graciously ) overlooked.

However, last term DS had to do some time telling homework ie write down what the time is on the clock face shown. Teacher marked all of the his work correct when over half was incorrect. I wrote a note to the teacher asking about it and she apologised profusely saying that she had marked the homework but had no idea how that had happened.

This week's homework for numeracy had a number pattern that was unfathomable and the literacy homework had a grammatical error that would have made the work confusing for children.

What really pissed me off a lot was that DS's literacy homework from last week was marked all incorrect when not only was it correct, but the week before's work was very, very similar and again all correct, but this was accepted by the very same teacher. Again I made a note in DS's literacy homework book, and all she has done is initial and date my comments.

The marking is very sloppy and I wonder whether I should raise all these issues with the HT or do I let it go and see if things improve. All parents recently received a note from the HT stating that moves were afoot to improve the quality of teaching and learning in the school.

Do I put up and shut up or speak up?

(sorry, very long and rather dull...)

zola (I know this is a petty point but I take issure with your 'poster' comment. Sorry.)
Children need to be guided how to make posters. There are lots of skills involved: presentation; contrasting colour; diagrams, labels, captions; writing simple, full sentences giving specific information; flaps (how to fit the writing in a space); calligrams for the title; discussion and learning from others/ sharing information.
That is quite apart from the work that would have gone on beforehand - research, categorising under title/headings.

Often, non-fiction writing will be a follow-up activity.

Petty point taken . My experience is in FE [out of depth on a primary board and hijacking horribly, it's just my dander is up!], where I always felt that the students were so disastrously weak at anything involving writing, research etc that time should have been spent helping them improve on that, rather than making posters.
The difference with FE, of course, is that colleges are businesses, and if a student fails to have fun every minute of every class they can just leave, losing the college lots of money.

perhaps the parent of the struggling child is pleased it isn't the teacher with a degree in Meeja studies

at least they have a degree and haven't just been fast tracked because they worked in a bank

Try this one
m.guardian.co.uk/education/2013/mar/10/free-school-head-no-qualification

Fast Track-For talented people from other career paths to complete high quality ITT and be awarded QTS in just 6 months.

This can lead to being put forward for Accelerate to Headship programme, where top 200 outstanding teachers accelerated to Headship positions

What's "Meeja"?

Ah, the penny dropped. It's "Media," right? Two nations divided by a common language and all that.

In Scotland you have to have a degree (or two years of University as part of a degree) to teach a subject. Not so in the south.

I'm not too concerned about the connection between a degree, a teacher training course and actually teaching.
Many of the best teachers I've worked with (and I've worked with scores) say they learnt nothing on their TT courses. Sure, they learned about theories and presentations and making things fun but they didn't learn the basic stuff-stuff like how to actually teach kids how to read.

They are very angry about it actually.

That's true. Nothing in my degree taught me how to teach children to read. There wasn't a huge amount of fun stuff, either, though. And one afternoon on SEN....am struggling to remember what the hell we did do now....

I think my degree was good preparation for teaching but it's only when you have sole responsibility for a class you really start to learn what teaching means. Think we only got two days on SEN though.

Well my degree was Maths, very, very interesting but nothing to do with teaching. Then my PGCE was a bit pathetic really, I learnt a lot in my placements but the time at uni was a complete waste of time.

Mine was English Lit and Primary Ed there was a lot of theory, which was pretty useless. Teaching practices were always a million times more useful.

The best Maths teacher I know is someone who struggled terribly with it at school.
She is bloody brilliant.
No teaching qualification.

Moondog, I wonder if that is because she knew how difficult it was for some students to understand so she could teach it in a manner that enabled children to learn maths more easily?

That is a large part of it.
Also the fact that she is now an expert at instructional design.