During our GCSE year, the school experimented with letting pupils write a comment for their report. I was actually more insufferably cocky then than I am now. My French self-appraisal began as follows.
“I have immense flair for all languages. French is no exception”
She made me change “immense” to “some” and predicted me a C. When I got an A, she collared me at the student awards and exclaimed “ah, my favoureeet pupeeel!”.
She’d obviously learned sarcasm in her time here.
For all my CSE exams I did zero project work and zero written content during the actual exams. The only sections I completed were the multiple choice parts, which I filled out randomly without reading the questions.
I got very low passing grades in all exams. I never failed one!!! Had I known that the only requirement for a passing grade was simply to show up, then I wouldn’t have bothered showing up.
I had an overly unjust poor opinion of most of my teachers. Even when I was older I told my daughter to never trust a teacher on face value. Probably not great advice, but thankfully she never took that particular piece of advice too seriously, and after a while of doing bar work etc. she took a job as a teacher’s assistant. She then went to Open University, and at 33 she is now a French teacher.
I have since decided to like teachers more. 