Who's your form teacher?

This doesn't make sense. Please give more context.

It could be: Who's is your former teacher? or Who's your forum teacher?

Is your first language American English?

Yes.

"Form" is an old fashioned British English equivalent of "class" in a school context. You belo0ng to a form, and you might have different teachers for different subjects, e.g. Latin, mathematics, history, chemistry, biology etc but you also have a form teacher.

What does a form teacher do?

You go into class in the morning, somebody checks the register. This "somebody" is normally your form teacher. He/she will usually teach a general subject like English. Your English class may start then.
Then the "form" splits up as different pupils may be scheduled to attend different classes throughout the day.
Next morning, you all gather again in your form room and be met by your form teacher.

Interesting. It's similar to the home room format used here years ago.

Thanks.

A brief run-down of the British education system of my youth, prior to university entrance:

Infants school: age 5 to 7
Junior school: age 7 to 11
Secondary school: age 11 to 16,17 or 18 or even 19

In infant and junior school, you were in a class of maybe 20 to 30 kids, you had a class teacher, he or she took the register and then taught the class all day, all the subjects except maybe in Juniors there would be a music teacher. You went, naturally, to your class teacher for pastoral issues.

Secondary school was a culture shock, because you had a different teacher for each subject. Each year was divided up into classes, and each class (or "form" if you went to public or grammar school) had a teacher assigned to it to be your kind of home teacher who kept a more or less fatherly eye on his own class, as well as having his subject teaching duties. At the school I went to, (Alleyn's School, in Dulwich, London) the teachers were called "masters", and you had the Headmaster, and subject masters, e.g. Latin, maths, English, geography, history, art, music, PE (physical education), RE (religious education, often a priest) etc and your own form master, who was just one of the academic staff. You arrived in the morning, attended Assembly, went to your form room, where your form master took the register, then he would go off and take his first lesson (or "period") of the day, and his place would be taken by your form's first subject master of the day. You tended to stay in the form room and were taught by a succession of different masters except you would go to the gym for PE, and specialist rooms for art, music, physics and chemistry. if you had an issue or problem your form master was your first port of call, especially for pastoral or non-academic matters.

This is unlike McTag's description, where the kids disperse. At my school, most subjects came to us.

this describes what students must have felt/feel if they move to a different educational system

As a result of our family moving (once) and many schools being built to accommodate the baby boom, I switched schools every 6 - 12 months from when I started kindergarten til I started high school. Luckily, it was all in the same school board so I didn't have to adjust to a wildly different system like the one you've described.

Good answers.

At every school I've taught in the kids move about, you can't have a Chemistry practical in an English classroom.

Kids used to be taught in forms, but now they're mixed up and all over the place. PSHE (or whatever they call it now) tends to be the only thing taught in forms.

The Form Tutor is primarily in charge of pastoral matters, attendance, welfare that sort of thing.

Form teacher isn't a common English term (from a person whose first language is English).

It is in the UK.

You crazy Brits and your so called English flavoUred English!

This was pretty crap basically.

Who wrote that, Eric Coates?

Ok I see, Ray Martin. Nice old memories.

It's one of those tunes you never forget. That and The Flashing Blade, although that's probably just my generation.

mark

This was the 1960s, and Alleyn's was rather old fashioned even then. We had old wooden desks with a seat attached. Quite a few of my schoolmates were extras in a Lindsay Anderson film called 'If', and the school shown in that was very similar, except that Alleyn's was a day, not boarding school. The location used was Cheltenham College. The Wikipedia article about the film is misleading because it seems to imply that all the schoolboys shown were actually Cheltenham pupils.



We stayed in the form room and the masters came to us for subjects like English, French, Latin, maths, geography, history, Divinity (what they call RE nowadays I expect), but for some periods we went to the Science Block, the gym, the music room, or the art room. The masters wore gowns and the blackboards were on huge easels.