You get a homework sheet, you are nine years old, and it is too hard.
You ask Mum to help.
She can’t figure it out, so you ask Dad – who is VERY busy with other things – and he looks at it before declaring the sheet as ‘flawed’.
Then Dad writes a critique of the sheet, where it is wrong and how he is not pleased. The next week he get’s a note, on a ‘With Compliments’ slip.
“My apologies for not replying to your post-it notes sooner. I do agree the questions were not well designed and I regret that I did not have time to check through the flow chart completely before giving it to the group. However, on going through the homework, the children learnt something useful about the importance of wording questions precisely.
If you wish to discuss this further I could see you for 10 minutes at Parents’ Evening.”
Brilliant!
Who said that the Labour Government was no good for the education system, with this kind of quick-thinking?
I suppose it was unfair of me to expect a Primary level educator to actually read ALL of a flow chart that contained fewer than ten questions. It was incredulous of me to expect a flow chart to not end with a question, obviously.
Either way this note is a thing of beauty, and obvious grammatical errors aside – although I’m not really one to criticise on that front – I am glad to have such a great response.
Lesson Learned? No need to worry about getting something wrong as long as the children learn an extra lesson*
* Even if the lesson is ‘My teacher is not very good at her job’