Dally wrote:
I was being sarcastic with the word "scraped." Like alot of clever girls she's a perfectionist and convinces herself she's failed if she stuggles on a one mark question, which is another big problem. i know she's not alone in that - we have friends whose daughters who are the same. Back to our girl I have tried to explain she'll be brighter than most at a Russell Group university and it doesn't matter if one or two people seem brilliant. I likened it to the England football team where all 11 are excellent but maybe one or two are head and shoulders above the others. Even then vistually no English players would be picked for Brazil (if they could be) but nevertheless they remain excellent players and truly outstanding compared with millions of others.
For those who are parents - boys are so much easier (unless they go right off the rails)!!
I think my easy going attitude to life has rubbed off on my girls because they'll come to me for advice (I'm taking the eldest to look over a car and a lease contract this afternoon) but go to their short tempered mother for an argument, they know that if they tried to pick an argument with me it would go no further than the first sentence
so in that respect their upbringing has been a doddle to me.
On your issue I have nothing more to add than what has already been said by others really except for the fact that in my dealings with hundreds of clients businesses I'm finding that English people who speak a foreign language are held at a premium and you'd be surprised at the type of business that has foreign clients or owners, even very small enterprises.
Just to give a couple of examples one of my clients is a subsiduary of the Toyota Corp and so obviously Japanese would be invaluable there, quite a few of the senior staff are Japanese who speak English but prefer their English staff to have an understanding if not a fluency in Japanese, many of the office staff and even line operators have taken advantage of the company courses in Japanese and as you'd expect the company culture is based on everything they do at Head Office even to the extent of refering to everyone by name and the prefix "san" even if they are English, your daughter would probably love it there.
And just this week I was at a production plant where most of the 200+ line staff are Polish on fairly basic wages, in the office on the day I was there was a young lad who was talking to someone on the phone for a long time in a language that was eastern european, after he had left I was told that he'd been negotiating a contract on behalf of the company with a Russian client speaking fluent Russian, the lad was Polish but when he'd spoken in the office I thought he was English so perfect was his accent, he also had a Masters degree in Engineering and until then had been employed washing vegetables on the line until they'd asked if anyone could speak a little Russian - they won't be employing him on the line anymore.
