Year 2 teacher had to be corrected on pronunciation of Pepys

[CheshireSplat]

Interested to hear opinions on this.

DD's class are doing the great fire of London and their teacher was talking about the diary of Samuel "Peppis". DD's friend told him it was Peeps in the inimitable style of a 6 year old.

Should I be worried. New teacher to the school. I don't tend to interfere but I would've thought that was pretty general knowledge.

Then when he gave them times tables he did 2 x 1, 2 x 2, 2 x 3 etc which is the wrong way round.....

Happy to be told to wind my neck in!

@Prettysureitsnotok

I have a first class honours degree and a masters and had to google the guy! Genuinely never heard of him. Reading it I would have thought the pronunciation was peppys... I very much doubt this makes the teacher stupid.

I'm with Keith on this one.

@Luckyme2 sorry if I was a bit snappy, it's a bit of a sore spot for me that people have such high standards for teachers and yet so little respect for them! My bugbear though, not yours! Sorry!

mybump I have utmost respect for teachers. It is a job I could never do. So no need for apologies!
(disclaimer - apart from the one who taught me that Manchester was the capital of England My poor DM was horrified!)

@Luckyme2 I'm not surprised! I certainly don't think all teachers are perfect, but I do get a bit fed up hearing about how rubbish we all are! You've cheered me up though - thanks!

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I'm more surprised that there are people on this thread who've never heard of Samuel Pepys. I guess they never studied the Great Fire of London at primary school.

The times table one is interesting because although numerically the two versions are the same, as someone else has said, conceptually they're quite different. The advantage of the 1x3, 2x3 for ease of learning initially is that you are counting a different number of groups of the same value all in the same table, whereas with the 3x1, 3x2 you are using a different value every time. All the times tables songs I've ever heard have been the 'one two is two' type as well.

Perhaps they’re not from London?

We didn't study the great fire of London but then I'm in Scotland so maybe there were other events that were more relevant

At my school, we expose children to both ways of learning times tables and focus on what it actually means, expecting them to be able to explain, eg 2 lots of 3, 2 happening 3 times etc.
The on this thread is a bit eugh.

Sorry for the slight tangent but this seems a good place to ask: at what point is it reasonable to expect teachers to have a good grasp of apostrophes? There appear to be several at my DDs’ school that can’t use them correctly, including DD2’s Y2 teacher. When would children start learning this at school?

Where did you learn about the Great Fire of London though?

It's English history which is taught in most English Primary Schools - but not all. It's not so important to the rest of the world.

Before the National Curriculum, schools were taught under less regulation. I remember at my first secondary school we were retaught most of the work we'd covered in primary school as not all the local primary schools taught the same things.

A few years later we moved to a different area of the UK and suddenly I went from being top of the class to bottom as I hadn't covered any of the French, German, Music or History material.

“Had to be corrected”

No the teacher didn’t HAVE to be corrected.

You sound arrogant and judgemental. Every day with 30 7 year olds and their judgemental parents hovering in the background picking apart what you do.

Can’t imagine why people are put off the profession.

I’ve just read a piece about The Apprentice in the Daily Mirror, which I know is a rag, but in theory is written by professional journalists, and it said

“Queue hilarity as the boys mistook a piece of diving equipment for an octopus and the girls bought two of the same item.”
FFS

I would expect any qualified teacher to know how to use apostrophes. It takes half an hour’s concentration for a literate person to learn the rules. The guy who edited the magazine of a society I belonged to was great at 99% of the job but he had a complete blind spot about apostrophes. I gave him an A6 revision card with the rules listed out and he never got them wrong again.

I am so confused, I have no idea what way I recite times tables after reading this!

Well, I know about Samuel Pepys anyway because his diary is very famous and is used as a source of evidence for all sorts of 17th century things, and is very widely quoted. He's just a very well-known historical writer. So I would expect lots of people to have heard of him.

I only mentioned the Great Fire because it's a popular topic at primary schools in England, not just in London (just like the Gunpowder Plot is not just studied in London).

Another one who was taught times tables that way (2 x 3, 2x 4, 2x 5 etc.). I am in Scotland where this appears to be the standard way to be taught times tables.

I also didn’t learn about the Great Fire of London at any point during school. Presumably as I was educated in Scotland where there were different, more relevant historical topics to be taught to us. We were taught some topics that I imagine weren’t taught in England. Why does it matter?

It sounds like some of our teachers could do with your crib sheet Behemoth - I have seen pretty much every possible apostrophe-related error at school.

DD2’s spelling sheet also instructs ‘Please practice ready for our spelling test’ 🤦‍♀️

We even have our own times table poster. It's not wrong just different (as I said before)

I'm Irish and never learned about Pepys in school. We learned about our own history in primary school, not English history (apart from Henry VIII for some reason.) Was the teacher English?

(I do actually know how to pronounce his name, but only because I lived on a road named after him in Deptford, haha!)

Times tables are fine.
Pronunciation....meh. He teaches English,History,Science,Maths,Geography,Art,RE etc. Every now and then there will be things that he is not particularly familiar with or are very obscure. It happens.
Would you like to have a go at pronouncing ancient greek names?

I posted a while back about times tables the wrong way round and was told the "wrong" way was correct as it is about doubling - 2 x 6 is double 6. I still think it works better as 6 x 2 is 6 sets of 2 things.

Re Pepys - my self taught grandpa thought archipelago was "Archie PELL ah go. It was a word he had only read and never heard.

It's pretty common knowledge that it's pronounced peeps.

A primary school teacher getting it wrong wouldn't surprise me sadly though. I'm not convinced that all of them are super bright. That's not to say that they're not good at what they do of course.

Meh I didn't know