Strange but true school incidents

Parent Cafe
1

<p>First, it is not my intention for this to be a “bash the teacher” thread - I AM a teacher! But I just had a sudden flashback to an incident that happened on my second day of second grade, and I thought some of the rest of you might have some funny or interesting stories to share about your own or your kids’ experiences.</p>

<p>Mrs. McN gave us our first set of spelling words, read each one aloud, and used each one in a sentence. Then she told us to write sentences of our own using each word. Well, I got right to work, and you can imagine my pride when she collected our work, looked over the papers, and called one other boy and me to the front of the room. I should have realized that the boy, Robert, a migrant kid who had been in my first grade class for part of the year, wasn’t likely to be singled out for academic recognition, and sure enough, Mrs. McN wrote one of his sentences on the board, and the only correctly spelled word in the entire thing was the spelling word.</p>

<p>Then, she turned to me and said she wasn’t even going to bother to write any of my sentences on the board. She started screaming! “WHAT KIND OF SENTENCES ARE THESE???” I had used every spelling word in an analogy. </p>

<p>I was so embarrassed, but I never even thought to tell my mom about it. To be fair, this was back in the 60s, and Mrs. McN was an older lady who had probably had her teacher training in the 1920s. I was an early reader, but I have no idea how I learned about analogies. I didn’t use them again for quite a while!</p>

2

<p>You mean you literally wrote:</p>

<p>leaf:tree::finger:hand </p>

<p>or something like “Leaf is to tree as finger is to hand.”</p>

<p>?</p>

<p>In any case, I can’t imagine a teacher yelling at a student over confusion on the first set of spelling words of the year. Sheesh.</p>

3

<p>I may have told this story before…A Phys Ed test (rules of some sport) I took was missing the last page, so I thought I was done. I got a D on the test :eek: until my parents spoke to the principal. Don’t remember if I was allowed to retake the missing page or what. </p>

<p>Teacher was being incredibly unfair and we suspected she was happy to be able to deliver a D in Phys Ed to an otherwise academically perfect student. “Ha! We’ll see if you can pass MY class!” :D</p>

<p>This was 7th or 8th grade, I think.</p>

4

<p>Back in the dark ages (early 60’s) when I was in junior high, we actually had Spelling as a course–taught by the assistant football coach. I was personally offended by having to waste my time in such a ridiculous class, and I took every opportunity to correct the teacher’s spelling–and I had many such opportunities. Needless to say, the teacher/coach was NOT fond of me.</p>

<p>Fast forward to junior year–I’m sitting in 6th period study hall held in the school cafeteria, with probably 150 kids, most of whom are talking to their neighbors–including me, because of course I have finished my homework. The spelling-deficient coach is supervising study hall, and I hear my name called out over the microphone–I am kicked out of study hall for talking and told not to come back until I have been to the principal’s office .–he thinks he finally got me.</p>

<p>However, I never actually went to the principal’s office–I retreated to the school newspaper office for the rest of the school year during sixth period and nothing ever happened.</p>

<p>This was about the extent of my high school rebellion–can you spell N-E-R-D???</p>

5

<p>When my D was in the first grade, I was called to the principal’s office. The kids all had to write a sentence about Martin Luther King Jr. The school felt my D’s sentence was “inappropriate” (my grandmother had been a freedom rider, so my D knew quite a bit about him, his teachings, and inequality in the world). Her sentence read “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a great man who was assassinated by a bigot.” (her paper hangs framed in my home). </p>

<p>She is my precocious child. </p>

<p>(of course she is also my only child)</p>

6

<p>mommusic, I wrote the analogies out. I remember the first one: “Kitten is to cat as cygnet is to swan.” I had recently read a book about baby animals.</p>

<p>"just"aMom - love that story!</p>

7

<p>Many, many years ago my aunt was called in for a teacher conference. The elementary school teacher said her son was not doing the assigned math problems. He was doing different math problems. My aunt asked, “Is he learning his math?” The teacher said, “yes”. “Well, isn’t that what’s important?” The teacher responded, “Mrs. J., the world needs nonconformists, but NOT in the 4th grade.”</p>

8

<p>In 4th grade my son transferred to a new school and turned in a writing assignment on irony. In his long story he was a wartime sniper who shot his target only to find out that it was me (his dad) after he shot. The first year teacher called to warn me. I loved the paper and thought it was a perfect use of irony (and the unexpected sadness of war). When the wise principal was consulted by the teacher, my son was transferred to an advanced writing class.</p>

9

<p>The grade: Third.
The teacher: Mrs. Ellithorpe
The question: “Anyone who is having a hard time reading the blackboard, please raise your hand.”</p>

<p>I raised my hand - and got moved to the very back row of the classroom, where it was not hard - it was impossible - to see anything at all. The teacher never bothered to let my mother know I was having vision problems, so it was several months before my mother took me to see the eye doctor. I was diagnosed with 20/2000 vision in my left eye. (My right eye was a little better, but not enough to compensate. The lovely cat’s-eye glasses are another story.)</p>

<p>I still don’t know why she hated me so much - she made her dislike obvious by inviting all the girls in the class but me to her granddaughter’s birthday party. Wow, I cannot imagine things like this happening in this day and age!</p>

10

<p>3rd grade - my #2 daughter. very precocious but highly unorganized.
Meet the Teacher night - Mrs G (first year teacher) stressed that ALL students will be organized and have neat desks. It’s two weeks into school and I peek into my daughter’s desk - what a mess!
So after the talk I introduce myself. Remind her that she tends to read chapter books during Math and she had difficulty with organization that neither her first or second grade teacher could resolve - thinking a heads up would be in order.
She looked at me - her eyes got huge and she exclaimed “All children in my class will be organized”.
Okkkkkaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy. I stifled my giggle and got the heck out. At 21 she is still a disorganized mess.</p>

11

<p>Fourth grade - we have moved to Singapore and my parents put me into the Singapore American school. They have recently implemented what they call independent guided education (IGE). What that means is that the classroom - probably about the size of a small gym - is divided up into work zones. The students are to go around from zone to zone and do their work at their own pace. </p>

<p>At the end of the first month, my parents get a call for a parent teacher conference. “We are very concerned about your son’s math skills. He has been unable to complete even one unit this month.” Since my parents knew I was a very good math student the previous year, they came home and asked me why I had not completed a math unit. </p>

<p>My mom’s jaw dropped when I informed her that I had not even started a math unit as I would rather read!!! My dad asked why and I informed them that that the math assignments were the same as I had done the previous year. </p>

<p>Turns out the IGE teachers had not noticed that I wasn’t moving from station to station but rather just hanging out in the reading zone and reading all day.</p>

<p>Needless to say my parents had me in another school shortly thereafter - where the math problem was solved by having me do 6th grade math with another class instead of sitting in the 4th grade math.</p>

12

<p>We moved to Missouri when my son (now 20) had just turned 5. When I went to register him for kindergarten, I was told that his birthday was after their July 1 cutoff–“Come back next year.” </p>

<p>I asked for an exception since my son’s birthday was less than 3 weeks after the cutoff–he was a bright, calm kid–and tall for his age. They offered to test him for “early admission.” After the test the counselor said, “He must have had this test before OR someone (giving me the evil eye) prepped him for it. . .” Which I denied. (I wasn’t motivated to push my kid–I just didn’t want him sitting around a small apartment with me, a 2yo and newborn that year–and I couldn’t afford a private preschool). I asked her why she thought that. She huffed at me, and said, "Well! No 5yo uses the word “vehicle.” She rolled her eyes and acted so rude.
I left the school baffled and offended. Later I asked my son how he had used this word. On the test he was shown a group of pictures and asked “what are these?” and he answered “vehicles.” (I guess they were expecting, “things that go” or “things that move” as an answer). Anyway, I asked him how he knew this word (which I don’t think is THAT unusual for a 5yo)–he said he’d taken a field trip with his old pre-school (a Head Start program) to the city garage–and had seen “all the vehicles there.”<br>
Anyway, my son did start kindergarten that year, and it was fine for him.
I regretted not reporting that counselor’s rudeness, but I didn’t want her to “target” my kid. . .</p>

<p>Last year I got a call from the school nurse --my kid had been hit in the mouth with a tennis racket in gym class. Since he has braces his mouth was bleeding a lot, kids were grossed out and my son started to go into the building to wash it off. According to my son, the gym teacher said, “Wait a minute,” and pulling him back by the arm, asked him where he thought he was going. He said “to the nurse’s office.” Still holding onto my son, the teacher called the class to gather around and said, “You don’t need to see the nurse. Stay here–I want everyone to see you! Look at him–this is what happens to kids who don’t follow instructions!”
I thought the teacher should let an injured student go and talk to the class about it later–instead of shaming the student and displaying the blood to the class. Again, I didn’t complain, because I know what middle school gym teachers are like. (OMG I can’t even write on CC what some of OURS did/said back in the 70s–they would never get away with that kind of sexual harassment/perversion today). If I complained I was sure the guy would pick on my (nerdy, unathletic) kid the rest of the year.</p>

13

<p>Not a tale of a horrible teacher (unlike Flatlander – now that is awful), but a lasting memory nonetheless. 7th grade “home ec”, 1967 (all-girls class, of course – the boys took “shop”). Every student was required to make a terrycloth poncho with ball fringe “to wear to the beach”. There was no chance that any of us would every wear those ugly things, but I tried to jazz mine up by choosing an oversized turquoise floral terry, turquoise ball fringe, and huge polished wooden buttons – maybe 1 1/4 inches across, just two to use at the back of the neckline. I loved those buttons. When I received the grade sheet for the sewing unit, my “A” was changed to a “B-”, with the comment, “Buttons too large for size of project.” This was the same teacher who told us that we could never eat dinner without a centerpiece, decisively smacking a vase of plastic flowers onto the table to emphasize her point.</p>

<p>A more exciting incident was the time the middle school band teacher, a disheviled and eccentric man, gestured so wildly with his baton that the raised chair upon which he was sitting was thrown off balance and both he and the chair toppled backwards off the stage. Fortunately he was not hurt.</p>

14

<p>My mom was called by my elementary school principal for numerous reasons, but their first interaction (and my personal favorite) is when I just started second grade.</p>

<p>My mom received a call at work for her to come to the principal’s office, and she rushed over to the school. When she arrived, the principal asked her to sit down, and told her, “your son was sent to me by Mrs. B. Can you guess why?” When my mother explained that she couldn’t figure out why (which was a horrible lie: I was a temperamental little tyke), the principal said, “your son tells me he finished his work early, started talking to Amanda, and Mrs. B told him to come up here for no reason.” My mom offered her a blank stare, and the principal finished: “But Mrs. B sent him up with the work he turned in: you might want to read it.”</p>

<p>On the back I had doodled a witch riding a broomstick and dropping apples on stick-figure children, with a line pointing to the witch identifying it as my teacher. I had completely forgotten about the doodle by the time I had stood up, walked over to her, and passed it in.</p>

<p>(When I got my academic record from my high school, I was shocked to discover that Mrs. B actually thought I was extraordinarily smart and well-behaved. Guess I’m not the only one with a bad memory.)</p>

15

<p>Gosh, I’m laughing out loud at these stories. I decided I should call my mom and tell her my analogy experience, and she told me about another incident that happened on the very same day in my sister’s class.</p>

<p>Sis was in Mrs. McK’s first grade class (I knew of her reputation as a cranky woman, because I’d often heard her from next door the previous year with Mrs. B). Mrs. McK passed out a note for the youngsters to take home, and one of the kids asked what it was. Mrs. McK replied that it was about a parents’ meeting taking place the next Tuesday. Apparently concerned that she had wrong information, little sis raised her hand timidly and said, “Teacher, MY paper says the meeting is on Thursday.”</p>

<p>Amazingly, Mrs. McK called my mom to report my sister’s “behavior,” and these were her words: “Well, in the first place, I didn’t even know if she coud speak English, much less read, and I certainly am not accustomed to being corrected by a six-year-old!”</p>

<p>Mom was too taken aback to say anything except that she was sure there would be no further problems.</p>

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<p>Flatlander I am so sorry that happened to you. How awful!</p>

<p>I have 2:</p>

<p>DH was a new kid in first grade and they were starting the year with a unit on farms and where food comes from. In this case milk.</p>

<p>Teacher: " Now class has anyone here ever milked a cow?"</p>

<p>DH: looks around, no one has raised their hand and though he had never lived anywhere but the SF bay area and has never been within 100 yards of a cow, raises his hand </p>

<p>Teacher: Ohhh how wonderful, Joey when did you get the chance to milk a cow</p>

<p>DH: Not anticipating the follow up question, but without skipping a beat On our farm in Ohio</p>

<p>Flash forward to “Back to School Night” and my MIL (who also had never lived anywhere outside the SF Bay Area) is there to meet with little Joey’s teacher.</p>

<p>Teacher: Oh and how are you adjusting life here in the Bay Area?</p>

<p>MIL: Confused Blank Stare</p>

<p>Teacher: I mean it must be a very different lifstyle than the one you had in Ohio. </p>

<p>MIL: Uhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmm Ohio???</p>

<p>Teacher: Yes! Has it been hard adjusting to city life…do you miss life on the farm?</p>

<p>MIL: The farm? I am sorry, I think you have me confused with someone else?I am Joey’s mother.</p>

<p>Teacher: Yes I know, Joey told us all about how he used to help milk the cows on your farm in Ohio.</p>

<p>MIL: Joooeyyyyyyy!</p>

<p>DH: slinks out to the swings</p>

<p>Mine happened in the 5th grade. You know how by the time kids are 9 or so they know who the class artists are and who they aren’t. I definately wasn’t one. I had begun to dread art because try as I might I could never make my projects and pieces look right. So, imagine how excited I was when my teacher Mrs Schossler…kind of a wannabe hippy lady…breezed into class with a tape player and the pronounced that we were doing art that “Isn’t supposed to look like anything.” She went on to explain abstraction and I remember feeling more and more excited and thinking “Yes! i can do that!” </p>

<p>So she put on the tape player to some jazzy tune and instructed us to tear colored tissue into pieces and glue them on a larger piece of construction paper. The only instruction; “It can’t look like anything.” Thnking I had this in the bag I finished off my piece by twisting some remaining tissue into bows and gluing one in each corner. Then I sat back proudly and waited to share my masterpiece.</p>

<p>She stopped off at my desk to check my progress. I smiled, sure that I was finally going to be praised for my art…I’d been making things that didn’t look like anything my whole life. Instead she leaned over grabbed my bows, tore them off and before moving on, stared down at my crestfallen face and sneered “That looked silly.”</p>

<p>That was the moment I gave up on art. I already knew I couldn’t make things that looked the way they were supposed to, but Mrs. Schossler confirmed that I also was incapable of making things that **didn’t **look like anything. </p>

<p>I never did another art project until I was a mom and worked on projects with my kids. They were much gentler critics ;)</p>

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<p>atomom, your story about the “vehicles” and expecting a “things that go” answer reminded me of two stories with our son, though the teacher for one was me and the tester for the other wasn’t a teacher but a psychologist who had a private practice and also taught at a state U.</p>

<p>When our son was 3, he was doing a worksheet for either K or first graders that asked the child to circle the pictures that answer the question “Can it go?” (i.e. circle that things that move). Our son circled a drawing of groups of people sitting around circular tables eating, and I was puzzled that he would circle that this could “go” and asked what he thought the drawing was of, and he said a restaurant, and I asked, “And you feel this can go?” and he said, “Well, it could be on a boat, so I’d say yes.” He also had a sheet that asked him to circle the things that start with the letter R, and he circled what to me looked like a horse, and I knew he could spell “horse” since he was 2, so felt he must think this drawing was of something else, so asked him what he thought it was and he said, “It’s a RACE horse.” It was like he was always trying to make things fit, even if they weren’t meant by the worksheet producers to fit, and this was the day we had the chat about “Creativity is great and will take you far, so keep it by all means, but understand you don’t think like most people think and will likely have to take standardized tests someday, so try to <em>also</em> be able to put yourself in a test creator’s shoes and answer the way <em>they</em> are likely looking for in order to see you know the information they are testing.” I feel this chat had a side benefit in his just being able to “get” where other people are coming from far better than he might have had we never had that chat, so something was learned from worksheets after all. It was also that week where I felt a normal classroom would not be able to nurture our son’s mind very well, as teacher’s would not want to see two sets of answers (one for his own way of thinking and one for their own) and he’d probably get lazy and just start “thinking to meet the teacher’s mind” rather than having a flexible mind. By homeschooling, he was able to write two sets of answers (the one the book/advisory teacher is likely wanting and the one he feels just as good or better) and get feedback on both without troubling anyone really.</p>

<p>Onto the second story, our son was given IQ and academic testing at age 7, and on the way to the psychologist, I explained to our son that he’d be taking both an IQ test (what he’d been wanting to take for years as people had been telling him he should have one since he was a toddler and so he had been curious as to how he’d do) and an achievement test (in order for us to help place him in public school should my biopsy scheduled for later that day show cancer and we be unable to homeschool him much longer), and he asked what the difference was and so I explained. Little did we know one of the questions on one of those exams (not sure which it was) asked him to state the difference between IQ tests (or maybe it was “tests of ability” -not sure anymore, but it was something we covered on the drive over to her) and achievement tests, and our son answered by starting with, “So funny you should ask that as on the ride here, I learned this very answer…” and luckily, she somehow knew it wasn’t because I was teaching to a test, but that it just came up in conversation given that he was getting both that morning. But she might have realized this due to many things on the test (like repeating random sets of number forwards and backwards) not exactly being something someone can test for anyway (or can they? Do they always use the same numbers such that someone with a copy of the test could just have the kid memorize all the sets? Not sure how that part of the test is done really). Glad your son got to enter 1st grade even with the tester’s skepticism!</p>

18

<p>One of D’s high school teachers suffered a serious stroke halfway through the semester. She was placed on medical leave and a substitute was hired. But for some reason at the end of the semester the school insisted that the original teacher, who was still at home recovering at that point, assign the final grades. The poor woman was still suffering from a lot of mental confusion and assigned everyone in the class a C regardless of their point totals except for one boy to whom she inexplicably awarded a B. </p>

<p>Daughter had earned an A, but it took weeks of eppeals, phone calls, and arguments with the school to get it all straightened out and get the grade changed. To this day I still don’t understand why they didn’t just have the substitute give the grades and let the poor, sick original teacher recover in peace.</p>

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<p>"just"amom, I like both your story and your name here!</p>

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<p>historymom, that art teacher was really something - she must have felt she HAD to have some "constructive’ (or construction paper) criticism about everything, don’t you think? It’s teachers like that, who can only see something that they don’t like rather than anything positive and thus don’t nurture their students, that really give teachers a bad rap.</p>