Too Mature comment on my son's essay

[Magpie27]

I have just joined this board and it looks great. My son has had a 'too mature' comment on his essay at Soham Village College in Cambridgeshire.

He IS mature for his age because his parents are getting on a bit now.

Has anyone else come across this from teachers? What do they mean, do you think?

By the way - I have a superb Mother travel cot if anyone wants to buy it.

Sorry, stressed today, I don't mean to sound so irritable!

I agree IHeart. Of course teachers will go through themes, essay planning, choice quotations with every student. That's their job. They want their students to just as well as they possibly can. It won't be the case, however, that kids with 'literate' (what has that to do with anything, really - 'literary' maybe) parents can take loads into the ca with them. So far the info. we've been given suggests one sheet each with no chunks of text / drafts etc allowed. If a student is prepared, in his / her own time to write the essay at home then learn it, good on them.

Hmmm...perhaps we English teachers are just grumpy today. And it's my morning off!

"You don't think it possible that the teacher might adequately prepare ALL students for the assessment?"

I don't think it's overly contentious to point out that exam results are strongly correlated with parental education.

Interesting article:

www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/sep/21/schools-gcse-results-league-tables

I know tokyonambu, that's why I said sorry!

I think as a teacher you just have to do your best with whoever walks into your classroom in September. Don't think we're unaware of the issues you point out but you have to work with what you've got.

It's my day off too, I'm going to stop thinking about educational issues now!

I don't really get the relevance of Venona surely from Miller's POV he was writing about McCarthyism and its effect on relatively "ordinary" people those in the entertainment industry, teachers, union officials... unless the Venona Papers back up the blacklisting in those areas by the HUAC and the American Legion, which I don't think they do? He'd fallen out with his good friend Elia Kazan over Kazan's testimony to the HUAC just before writing The Crucible and was himself denied a passport to attend its London opening -- I don't think the fact that there were Soviet spies in the State Department (has anyone ever seriously argued that there weren't?) diminishes the points he's trying to make in The Crucible or the cultural background against which it's written.

I was punished with detention for writing essays that my parents 'must' have written for me. Of course they hadn't. I was just clever. Yup, still bitter about it! This was many years ago, however. I hope things have changed since then.

" I don't think the fact that there were Soviet spies in the State Department (has anyone ever seriously argued that there weren't?) diminishes the points he's trying to make in The Crucible or the cultural background against which it's written."

You may be right. I think the problem is that he equates naive young girls with people who joined the CPUSA in the post-Holomodor 1930s, and I have a difficulty with that. The CPUSA was a fairly naked Stalinist organisation, and there's a rich irony in members of the CPUSA whinging about being traduced by HUAC and McCarthy's senate equivalent when the CPUSA position on the Stalinist Purges (in which rather than being denied work as screen-writers, artists were routinely shot) was that they were "a signal service to the cause of progressive humanity."

That the post 1950s red scares are a scar on democratic processes goes without saying. However, it's one of those "plague on both their houses" things: anyone who was a member of the CPUSA post 1935-ish was a fuckwit for whom it's hard to work up much sympathy. Miller, to me, sets up a dubious moral balance, in which the bona fides of the persecuted as innocent victims are a given. I don't think membership of the CPUSA is something that allows you to claim the moral high-ground, and I think Kazan's nuanced view on his testimony (wikipedia isn't bad on this occasion) is interesting.

I also still remember bitterly questions as to whether work was my own. It never got as far as detention but it still smarts!

Magpie did you get to the bottom of the comment?