Pancake supper very nice. Becky makes wonderful pancakes. Man next to me insisting the origins of pancakes on Shrove Tuesday was something to do with a Jewish feast but I'm pretty sure it was due to using up eggs, butter etc before Lent started.
Yesterday morning J's alarm clock went off an hour early for some reason. He'd been up for quite some time before he realised he was an hour ahead of himself.
Went to coffee morning yesterday which was ok. Very good and didn't eat a biscuit. As got back home my mobile rang. It was J's English teacher. They did a mock assessment over 2 days before half term and it's turned into something of a disaster for him. Firstly he was off sick when they had the lesson to prepare them for it. Then on the first day when he started using the laptop it ran out of battery straight away so he had to write by hand. On the second day the laptop worked ok but he couldn't save onto the hard drive only onto the teacher's memory stick. Guess what happened when she tried to load it from the memory stick? Nothing. His work has just vanished into the ether. There are now 2 options: either she marks it all on the basis of the first half which isn't his best or he does the whole thing again. Neither particularly appeals to him but he's going to have to see her today and decide. She was very apologetic. I said to her it's probably better to encounter thse problems now and not further down the line and hopefully they'll make more effort to ensure this sort of thing doesn't happen again.
This is nothing compared to some of the problems my friend's son has had with controlled assessments. As for my niece, her English teacher seems to be just plain incompetent. They haven't been properly prepared for the exams they've done so far. At Christmas they were sent home with a past paper to help them prepare and it was the wrong one. As part of English Language they have to do speaking and listening assessments and schools normally start them practising these a couple of years beforehand and they do several leading up to the date for submitting marks and they take their best ones for the final mark. J in Year 9 has already done a practice one. So can you believe that with the marks due in on March 30th my niece has not done a single speaking and listening assessment? Not even a practice. She overheard the Head of Department saying to the teacher 'You've got to get on with these assessments.' Apparently one parent who's quite high up in education has made a complaint and my brother's waiting to see how he got on.
As well as this she's one of the ones affected by all the controversy over the teachers being given information about the History GCSE as a result of which they had to scrap one module they'd already learnt and start another one.
Our kids deserve better than this, they really do.
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