Enrolment week always seems so hard in a Sixth Form College. It should be a time of excitement, fresh faced enthusiastic new students and positivity for the year ahead.
Then, as the week goes on the appointments get trickier and trickier. The conversations have less and less “Of course you can study that” and more and more “well, unfortunately you didn’t do as well as you had hoped so that isn’t right for you, instead why not consider this…”
It’s the hardest thing to have to tell a student that they won’t be a vet/doctor/engineer/architect/whatever else they always wanted, that they can’t even take the subjects they wanted because they missed the grade, because the school over predicted, they were ill on the day of the exam, they lost a teacher half way through the year or any of the other hundreds of reasons.
Maybe this year there have just been more students with unrealistic aspirations, but this year, more than before, I have felt like there’s a side to the Sixth Form Tutor that no one talks about, the part of you that has to turn a child’s unrealistic dream into something achievable, challenging and interesting so that they can be successful.
Sometimes we have to be the Dream Crushers. And it’s the right thing to do.
Reblogged this on The Echo Chamber.