Unlike the boys, however, Rachel tended to interpret her desire to understand and connect as weakness, and along with the other girls expressed a strong fear of failure. So, as we have seen in Chapter 3, Year 9 Rosie had strong dislikes for areas of mathematics that she found difficult, and Lizzie was relieved that she was no longer in the top set and the demands it made. Jenny, in the same set as Rosie, also described the top-set teaching as adversarial and test-driven, in a way which bears little resemblance to the teacher-as-resource picture painted by Michael.