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Our school isn’t upper middle class, but there are a large number of students applying to selective colleges. The teachers here would be insulted if you told them how to do their job. (I know because my son told the Latin teacher about the excellent advice for teachers recommendations at the MIT site - and he was applying to MIT and she was miffed.) Between the two of them, we only saw one teacher letter, but the math teacher that my younger son used couldn’t have written a better letter, especially for a kid who on the surface did not necessarily appear to have math as a strong suit.</p>
<p>I’m sure colleges have seen a lot of poorly written recommendations that don’t help the students, but they don’t necessarily count it against the student. (That at least was the gist of the MIT recommendation.)</p>