Would you complain about this teacher?

[CeliaFate]

Dd's teacher has some noisy kids in her class. She thanked the children who were listening and said the rest can go to hell.

Is that a reasonable thing to say? I'm a primary teacher and I was shocked, but I know things are different in secondary schools. Am I out of touch, or is that unacceptable?

You can't make every lesson exciting all the time. I happen to like doing French grammar but I am fully aware that I am atypical and most children hate it. However, if they want to get the higher grades at GCSE they will need to be able to master at least the basics. What that means is, bringing a pen to lessons, listening, attempting to answer questions, being willing to make a bit of effort when something isn't instantly easy, and not just giving up, sitting back and chatting instead. If every less is just fun fun fun, what are we actually teaching them about life? They need to learn to self-motivate, to not just opt out at the first hurdle, and I think it's too easy to blame teachers for poor behaviour instead of looking at the real issue, which is that we are training children to expect everything on a plate with no effort required.

I did not say lessons had to be "fun, fun, fun" and of course there are important basics to be learnt. However the Ofsted Framework makes it clear what the expectations are of schools and teachers, so some teachers are clearly not engaging the pupils or no school would be failing or requiring improvement due to weaknesses in teaching. Ofsted cannot be wrong all of the time and many parents are well aware of poor teaching in their children's schools. You might consider this lack of evidence, but I think I could name you schools where there are too many poor lessons. My local one in science lessons for a start! Lessons learning the basics are not necessarily boring. By boring I mean the lesson is not tailored to the needs of the pupils, the teacher talks too much, the teaching does not make appropriate use of resources and it is not pitched at the right level for the bright or less academic children. Therefore bad behaviour ensues. My children have suffered poor teaching and because they went to nice schools and were surrounded by nice children,they put up with it. They,nor anyone else, should not have to.

Do you really think that all schools deemed requiring improvement are definitely bad schools? I don't. Do you think Ofsted gets it right 100% of the time? I don't. Do you think there exists a teacher who can deliver consistently good, engaging lessons day in, day out with not a a boring one occasionally? I don't. Sorry if that makes me cynical and defeatist, but my view is informed by my own experience. No teacher wants to deliver a bad lesson, but sometimes it happens. Sometimes you plan what you think is a really interesting and engaging activity, and the students are just not willing to go with it, and it falls apart despite all your hard work and planning. On another day you might be feeling really exhausted or unwell, in any other job you'd be hiding behind your PC sipping lemsip and pretending to be sending some emails, so you cobble together a work sheet or two, and lo and behold the students behave decently and do the work and that magic word, progress, takes place. I wouldn't dream of doing that in front of Ofsted but the reality is no human being can deliver engaging lessons 100% of the time in truly challenging schools. A colleague of mine who tried (and was loved by management, had gained AST status) recently had a breakdown. Milly, you say your kids are nice and that they were in nice schools with other nice kids. I'm sorry they didn't get inspiring teaching all the time but they are so lucky that they were in an environment conducive to learning. Have you got any experience of a truly challenging school? I think you'd be less convinced by all the Ofsted stuff if you'd watched anyone try to implement it wholesale in that sort of environment. We don't know where the OP's daughter goes to school, and whether the teacher was way out of line or simply expressing frustration at the awful behaviour, but I think you'd have to know the context before passing judgment.

The reality is that I will never engage my pupils as much as a video game/ top shop or twitter. The reality is that it is likely in adult life they will need to do a lot of things that are not 'fun' . I am primarily there to teach them to be successful in their English GCSE and hopefully that will help them achieve their ambitions but I am not there to be a stand up comedian!

Exactly Agggghast. Shame so many parents can't accept the idea that their children might be anything less than angelic and therefore conclude that any bad behaviour in the classroom must be the fault of the teacher not making the lesson interesting enough...

Actually I do! I know a great deal about challenging schools.

If you take the issue to the Headteacher they will just ask the Head of Department to look into it. I'd give the Head of Dept a call but go in from the angle that the teachers seems to be having a tough time, with this class, at this time and could they look into it.

This doesn't make the teacher a bad teacher - they may be fine with all their other classes - it may just be a particular combination of kids that is making this group really tough and pushed the teacher to make this comment.

When a Head of Dept myself I often found moving 1 or 2 kids out into another group could drastically change the dynamics and get things back on track - to the benefit of all (including the teacher).