Ds (in yr 8) is good at maths - best subject, high achieving, wants to 'do maths' as a career, blardy blar. Unfortunately this year he loathes his maths teacher. He complains that she 'just can't teach', makes it boring, tells them all off for ridiculous things (e.g. for 'pretending' not to know something she had actually never taught them.) Ds tells me the other children feel the same way about her and other parents have complained in the past. (Realise this may all be 13 year old's exaggeration/hearsay.)
Apart from maths we are happy with the school, ds is happy and doing well.
Ds now says he wants to go down a maths set and is going to do deliberately badly in his next assessment. He says he would prefer to learn something slowly with a better teacher than nothing at all in the top set. We have a parents evening next week and dh and I were planning to have a chat with the teacher, see for ourselves what we think and possibly broach that ds is not happy.
However today she told ds that she can't see us at the parents evening because all her time slots are booked up . As an x teacher myself I am well aware of the workload pressures and stresses she is under and I want to work with the school not be a grumbler. Plus I'm aware that next year ds will probably have a different teacher. So I'm a bit stuck. Wwyd?
Options are:
- ring school, ask for an out of hours appointment with the teacher and tackle the problem head on? (but clearly she wont become a good teacher overnight just because we tell her that ds doesn't rate her) OR
- just accept that ds has a not so inspiring teacher this year and hope he gets someone better next year. AND
- ask for ds to go down a set or not?
Any secondary teachers out there? How would you want this to be resolved if it was a child in your class?