Christine Grieve is a mathematics teacher at St Edmunds College. Although she has quite an extensive knowledge of her subject, her teaching skills and methods are at best mediocre. In subjects such as Extension Mathematics, she often describes to her class the difficulty of the subject. She highly exaggerates this, and unfortunately for most in her classes, she is the reason. Her teaching method is quite simple; walk through a few examples, then set textbook work for the class. During these examples, she either makes it very unclear what to do, then proceeds to set questions covering sub-topics not explored in class, or she runs through too many examples, causing her to set a large amount of homework, some of which was still not covered. As for her expectations for class behavior, they focus solely on creating an ideal work environment for her. Her ideal working environment, to no surprise, is complete silence. It is understandable that she would expect this from the class whilst she is in the midst of marking exams, for example. However, she expects this all the time, which leads to students not enjoying the subject. This then leads to students having difficulty focusing on doing the assigned work, leading to poor results, which she then blames on the students. Of course, it is a bad idea to assume this is entirely her fault. It is reasonable to assume some students simply did not study enough, but, typically, upwards of 90% of her students are performing poorly, failing, or barely scraping a pass. It is key we solve this issue as soon as possible, to minimize the number of future students affected.
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