Let’s do this together

It was the annual speed-dating event with The Dark Lord’s teachers this week, with seven of them crammed into five-minute meeting slots over the course of one hour.

As we walked to school for our first parents’ evening slot, TDL gave me a rundown on the staff.

“My maths teacher is great – but has bad breath,” she warned. “Second is science, again lovely, but speaks so fast I don’t understand sometimes.”

I interrupted, “She has to get 30-odd dullard teenagers up to speed on biology, chemistry AND physics over five lessons every week! I’m not surprised she sounds like a 33rpm record played at 45rpm!”

Ignoring me, TDL continued, “Next one is my English teacher – she’s nice but very millennial. Smiles all the time and speaks in hashtags – live, laugh, love… making memories etc.

“And then there’s my Latin teacher. She’s Spanish and just keeps saying how lucky we are that there’s only 500 Latin verbs compared to 20,000 in Spanish. Then shouts, ‘So why haven’t you learned them ALL yet?’”

Finally, TDL described her music teacher. “He’s just constantly disappointed that nobody turns up for rehearsals.”

I found them all very friendly and supportive to a fault, and I’m constantly in awe of how well secondary school teachers know every single child despite the big classes.

We came away with a few reminders to step up the revision for mocks, but otherwise TDL’s reports were v good. We didn’t bother with PE – they wouldn’t recognise TDL anyway.

However, her tweedy history teacher in the humanities department uniform of cords and patches on his elbows did request that TDL didn’t call the British “evil b ***** ds” in her Boer War essay. “It’s a valid point, but perhaps make it less crudely in the exam,” he sighed.

Just as we were leaving, I bumped into friends of mine who are academics. Their daughter, who is also in TDL’s year, is lovely but not terribly interested in school. Her parents both looked a bit bemused at their offspring’s mediocre results.

Meanwhile, their carefree daughter seemed perfectly happy. “Well I thought that all went quite well,” she smiled, as my friends rolled their eyes.

■ Email siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk or write to Community Corner, PO Box 791, Winchester SO23 3RP.

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Yours, Siobhan