Serious question regarding Leaving Cert. English teacher

Badwulf

This is my first post on boards so sorry if I put it in the wrong place :pac:

I'll try to keep this short. In a nutshell I'm doing my Leaving Cert. next year (I'm in 6th year now) and am doing higher level English. Our English teacher (who we will call miss smith) has been my English teacher since last year. Basically me and all my other classmates think that miss smith is putting our leaving cert. English in danger due to the fact she is incompatant, lazy and uses words she does not even know the meaning of. In general she gives us notes on the various poets, novels and the movie, Children Of Men, we are suppose to be studying for our leaving cert. Now the problem is her notes are all atrocious, they do not help a small bit, contain notes that either
1.) Do not make sense. Example would be that she said the main protagionist in Children Of Men (Theo) was on a journey to find himself, which was one thing he was most definatly not on a journey to do, he was doing it for the greater good of humanity. There are many other examples I could give but I wont due to the fact I need all the charecters I can get.
2.) She copied straight of Google and gave to us. I mean it an entire page of notes she gave us on one of our novels were taken straight off Wikipedia.
on top of all that she also says long words that when we ask the meaning of she either gives a completly different meaning or says she doesn't know. Is 100% irrsponsible, will NOT correct our homework she gives us every night, and will never touch on important scenes in the film or novels.
So basically what I want to know is, is there any way I can get rid of miss smith? This is not just a case of "Miss smith was mean to me before and I want her gone" Our ENTIRE class of 15 agree with me and feel that she is jeprodising our Leaving cert. Last year we all signed a petition and gave it to the head princeapal but he did nothing due to the fact he was to leave the following year. What should we do? Should we make another petition and give it to the new princepal? Is there anyone of higher authority who we can see about it in case the princepal is good friends with miss smith and does not want to see her gone? If so how can I go about contacting these higher ups? Please my year is desperate to get rid of her or replace her due to the fact she is a terrible teacher who does not know the difference between "Two" and "Too" (And I'm not kidding on that part, she always gets them mixed up, like I may have a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes in this post but hot diggety dayum at least I know my Too/two/to's....I hope)

cathalio11

First of all, it is very difficult to make this assessment without knowing her class results from year to year. Of course if these are above the national average, they may have been largely influenced by grinds, but these should be known before you can make this accusation that she is jeopardising your Leaving Cert English.

This whole post is just full of my opinions on the matter as I don't know the facts. I believe that you may have just drawn the short stick here, mate. I have a teacher that I think is woeful too but I accept it and put in a lot of work at home to make up for it.

I have seen many cases where an unpopular teacher is deemed a terrible and incompetent teacher. Yet these teachers produce the grades year in year out. But honestly, your case doesn't seemed to be stemmed by unpopularity.

Lastly, if the teacher is performing his/her job to reasonable accommodations, she can't be "Fired". That being said, the students do not have very much say as to whether she is or not. The teacher's trade union would also make things very difficult and that is not what a school principal wants.

I don't like the idea of a petition. Maybe that is just me but reading it, I felt quite uneasy. Maybe you could get a few individuals to meet the principal and discuss the issue but it is clear that there are incompetent teachers scattered around the country and a lot of people just have to deal with this.

I hope your English goes well.

yoho139

I absolutely agree about the petition. Much too public, the principal would be likely to shut it down simply because they can't be having teachers undermined by students. Get a group to represent the class and have one of them request a meeting with the principal.

thelad95

To be honest, your principal's hands are tied with this one. The best thing he could do is get another teacher to give you grinds during a non-exam religion class or after school.

This type of situation occurs in nearly every school across the country. In fact my cousin went to a certain grinds school a couple of years ago and there was a similar situation. In my experience, I've had a maths teacher who would just go through the example at the start of an exercise and then spend the rest of the class correcting tests from other classes or doing god knows what on their computer while the class ran riot. I've also had a French teacher who was convinced that we should teach the language to ourselves and all she did was go through verbs with us.

There is very little chance of your teacher being sacked or you getting a new teacher. You should consider getting Key Notes. It has pretty much everything you need in Macbeth and gives decent guidelines on poetry.

Ultimately what keeps these teachers in their jobs is grinds. If a teacher was seen to consistently have sub-standard grades in their class over a prolonged period of time in state exams then they might be sacked.

However as long as they cover the course, and grades are moderate, then they are seen to be carrying out their job to a reasonable standard even though these grades are inflated due to grinds.

d1234

Get your parents/guardians involved. Students (and I'm a student) often don't have a voice (that's listened to) when it comes to issues like this. If a few parents/guardians put pressure on the principal you might have a different ending. Get a group formed and lobby the principal i.e. call them everyday and ask about any improvement. Good luck with your studies anyway.

robman60

This sounds similar to the situation with my French teacher. Unfortunately, it seems almost impossible to rectify a situation like this. I'll talk you through the steps we've taken without any success thus far.

1. Towards the end of fifth year three of the students, me included, met with the principal and discussed the issue. I felt positive after it and was hopeful we'd have a new teacher this year, but nothing happened.

2. At the registration day my mother asked the principal if any progress had been made in this regard but he said the teacher he'd organised phoned the day before saying she got a different job.

3. At our parent teacher meeting eight or so parents raised their concerns with the principal, but still things have continued. The meeting was only last week so perhaps some progress will be made.

ALL of the students who are going to be doing honours are getting grinds. The difference is just staggering. I've actually learnt more in three grinds than since the beginning of fifth year.

Would it be worth our while going to the board of management and raising the issue of incompetence. I'm confident that if we were to have an external supervisor in class he'd be found incompetent.