Foreign Perspectives

We had our first parent-teacher consultation with James’ teachers a couple of weeks back.

The first encounter with it was a few weeks earlier when he was issued with a timetable which he’d to have each of his teachers fill in a time between 3.45 and 6pm on the day of the consultation. Each slot was five minutes long and with over a dozen teachers, it sounded like a recipe for chaos.

In the end he missed out several of the teachers but we managed to pick up most of those he’d missed in the gaps that we had between the others. That meant for a very tiring afternoon as the first slot was just after 4pm and we were there right up t0 6pm with virtually no gaps to recuperate between teachers.

I say “teachers” but in reality they operate more like tutors since the classes are so small (just 17 in his) so it’s fairly easy for the teachers to pay individual attention to each pupil in their classes. They were pretty much all very upbeat and positive and the only area where he needs to up the ante is in French (which he should be quite good at). We came away really impressed at how much effort each teachers puts into each of the pupils and it’s confirmed our belief a year ago that it’s the right school for James. So far, he seems to be doing well in the subjects that really matter.

We thought we’d another couple of years to go before we needed to think about subject choices but it turns out that the first decision point is at the end of this year when he’s to choose between Spanish and German as his second language. At the moment, the front runner seems to be Spanish but that could change.