Teachers that don’t respond to their students need a swift kick in the pants, and an attitude adjustment. Happy to hear it all worked out for your son in the end.
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My family made the choice to move from one county to another (in the same metro area- distance was only about 15 miles) son that we would be in area eligible for an arts magnet school for my D’s HS.
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that was a very expensive choice…it was a choice that many, possibly the majority, cannot afford to do. So, those are stuck with the monopoly’s offerings.
@mom2collegekids - That was me- actually we downsized- so house payment went down $500 a month 
And it turned out to be one of the best decisions our family has ever made. It was just an example, but IMHO- there is always a choice in every situation. Sometimes they are not simple - but I would argue that very few are “stuck”.
There are awful teachers, awful parents, and awful kids. You don’t really get how awful they can be unless you’ve had to deal with one of them. That’s why people always get defensive in this type of conversation.
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there is always a choice in every situation
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I highly doubt that’s true. There are people who are still upside down on their homes. There are people who can’t downsize just yet. There are people who would have to move to a more expensive area to get their child in a better school. There are all kinds of reasons why many people are stuck where they are.
You were lucky that moving to a less expensive home put your child in a better school. The timing may have just been right for your family…the home you were selling wasn’t upside down, and your household size no longer needed the larger home. The stars were all aligned and that’s great.
@mom2collegekids - you are right that we were lucky- and we did end without our house being worth less than we paid- though we did not make a single penny Going ahead with the sale when that was going to be true (we got what we owed, so “lost” downpayment and value of all we had paid into mortgage for 11 years) was a CHOICE - and one I do not regret in the slightest. (And as I said, since we downsize we were able to save aggressively and make up some of what we lost) Other choices would have been to pay tuition for her to go to the school she ended up in anyway (open enrollment- would have cost us about $5k a year) for her to go to school in my district, (a unique bonus teachers often have) or to think about other private school/ homeschool options. And BTW- the district we were leaving is ranked 3rd in the state- but it wasn’t the right place my my kid’s HS. I simply refuse to believe that an ordinary “middle class” (which I know is a huge range) family NOT in crisis (financial, health or other) has NO choices when it comes to their kid’s HS and college careers. You clearly disagree- as is your right.
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I simply refuse to believe that an ordinary “middle class” (which I know is a huge range) family NOT in crisis (financial, health or other) has NO choices when it comes to their kid’s HS and college careers.
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Who was suggesting that middle class people w/o issues have no choices? Not me.
You were taking issue with my statement: “that was a very expensive choice…it was a choice that many, possibly the majority, cannot afford to do. So, those are stuck with the monopoly’s offerings.”
Nowhere was I limiting my position to middle class people with no issues. There are many, many, many people, ranking from low income to middle income that cannot afford to move their families to “better” school districts. Furthermore, many can’t afford the private school options or homeschooling options.
Since you want to express a straw man argument, I’ll end the discussion with you.
@mom2collegekids - ending a conversation you find unproductive is certainly your right as well, and in this case I absolutely agree with you. We are not on the same wavelength. For anyone else who might be interested, I recommend the scene in “dangerous minds” where the teacher and her students have a discussion which concludes “you can always choose something” - that is kind of what I was going for.
There is a small subset of the population who can just pick up and move. The vast majority of people cannot do that even today in a good housing market. Doing it several years ago when no one was buying houses? Pretty much impossible for many.
I won’t even touch the magnet school issue as they are virtually unheard of around here.
I take issue with this, because, as I said earlier, some teachers are “irrational” or at least unduly reactive when a parent approaches or communicates in a harmless & normal way. I recounted earlier what happened to me once when I approached a teacher. (All my other communications with teachers have generally been upbeat and normal; the exceptions were the one I relayed earlier & a different situation where the teacher had major untreated clinical depression & was therefore filled with anger.
Overall, I just really do put it on myself, the teacher, to set the tone. I’ve really had only one helicopter parent in my life, and it was in a tutoring, not a teaching, situation. The mother was obsessed, without exaggeration, and she was making her poor, normal daughter abnormal with all that obsession for a girl only in fourth grade, for heaven’s sake. Mom was the ultimate in neurotic and impossible to please, although her daughter was doing just fine. But these are the exceptions. Some of my colleagues, when confronted with either neurotic or helicopter types, simply blow the parent off politely by saying as little as possible. The parents who are not heli-parents get respected like the rest of the world and receive generous communication.
I’ve seen at one school – a hyper-competitive public, but not one my children attended – where the parents essentially run the school, and I don’t mean as helpful volunteers assisting an overworked staff, but rather the parents dominate, control, and demand. About half the families there wants their child to be #1, and that’s no exaggeration. It’s insane. I told one of the parents there recently that if the school offered me a million dollars to teach there, I would turn down the offer because the administration has no backbone and refuses to lead or let teachers lead. But that’s only 50% of what’s wrong with the school (obnoxiously pushy parents in that case – I doubt they’re similar to CC parents, from what I’ve read all these years). The other 50% is that the administration assumes that 100% of parents there are demanding A’s and AP classes, when the remaining 50% merely want a faculty & staff who communicates with them and who doesn’t let every student take Honors or AP classes, but provides guidance for the non-AP bound.
And whose fault is the latter? The administration’s, not the parents’. The faculty & staff are reacting based on assumptions, not on reality.
Both my wife and I work full-time, so we try to balance being the involved parents which confirm we care (we thought teachers urge us to be?), while being hands off enough to not annoy. It’s a tough balance and the reaction is always a mixed bag. I agree you should be more hands off as the child approaches 10th and 11th grade, but sometimes teens lie or mislead, so how do you know things are as they claim? I admire those of you that have 100% faith in your high school children to wait it out until semester grades post.
I think there is more to this than we usually imagine. Parents, protectiveness and advocacy for their kids can reach remarkable levels.
In youth athletics, I once witnessed a father (working the football yardage chains with me) work himself, literally, into a near-frenzy state when his kid wasn’t in the game during the first half. At half-time he immediately marched up to our coach and accosted him verbally from an in-your-face distance, and possibly would have become physical if it hadn’t been so obvious that he would be on the losing end of anything combative. This happened for no apparent reason, and with no instigation from me, as I attempted to calm him down. It showed me that I should avoid him whenever possible, and I have.
In any case, neurotic paranoia is wafting around all the time, with a little bit of it in everybody. If you get a pairing of parent and teacher where they both have more than their share, its an issue.
This is what I have observed as well. I did not mean to generalize that teachers who’ve been tortured by heli’s become or are entitled to become unreceptive to all parents, just that they are more aware of these types out there. Any teacher that maintains fair and receptive communication in dealing with heli’s, in my opinion, are saints. Perhaps I have seen far too many of these sorts of parents, as you have described as insane, where I could understand a teacher getting sick and tired of them. I would probably make a terrible teacher, as I could never deal with heli’s amicably.
For those teachers that are composed enough to deal with difficult and entitled parents, you have my respect and sympathies. I can understand if you get worn down or annoyed by them. I do not use this as an excuse for any resentful behavior toward a non-heli parent…that would be unprofessional. But I do see the human side to anyone that has to deal with immature behavior of a heli parent ‘on behalf of their special snowflake.’
And yes, those teachers, such as you, that hear a parent without assumption based on previous exposure to such parents, is a wonderful gift to parents that truly reach out to teachers for non entitled reasons. I do believe a teacher needs to listen before reacting/assuming. And for those that do, they should all get a yearly raise.
It’s interesting to me that the OP has not returned to this thread, despite having posted in several other threads since. I am still curious to know what question,** asked as nicely as possible**, induces ALL the kid’s teachers to be so offended as to brand the parent a troublemaker and take their resentment of the parent out on the kid. This just doesn’t fit with my own life experiences and the common-sense input folks are giving here. So please, @HS5331, tell us what the question was and how you can tell that other teachers are taking it out on the kid for that reason.
No one likes to be wrong, and teachers are no different. In the rare cases when it is necessary for me to intervene, I always include details and relevant facts including attachments. Having all my ducks in a row can be very intimidating to them, since it can leave them with no excuses and no way out. In my experience, most parents don’t prepare to this extent, and therefore are snowed or blindsided. But yes, they are the parents who maintain a great relationship with the teacher because they let the teacher “win.” I am a reasonable person and am always polite, but I am here to tell you that defensive reactions from the school are more common than not because teachers are only minimally supervised and they like it that way.
Would you agree that it’s not necessary to “let the teacher ‘win’” in order to have a great relationship with the teacher? You’ve only had to intervene in rare cases, as have I, and I’ve had details and relevant facts as well, in those rare cases. Yet I doubt the teachers felt blindsided or snowed. I’m luckier than many here - my kids’ teachers and I weren’t adversaries, even when we disagreed.
“Teachers are minimally supervised and like it that way”
Are there adults who LIKE to be consistently supervised (which I am take to mean “scrutinized” in this case)? I have’t met many. In my experience people (or schools, or companies) are most often “defensive” when they feel attacked. That’s instinctive.
As a teacher (and again, I am NOT blanket defending schools/teachers- there are LOTS of real issues that need resolution) one of the things I have noticed that parents don’t always perceive about classrooms/schools- is that we have to maintain a focus on the group as a whole. A parent has 1 person in the group to watch- I am watching 25 in my class, or 75 in my full course load, or 250 in the grade, or 1000 in the school. We do miss things- not b/c we don’t care, but b/c we are looking at the big picture. Generally I a grateful if a parent (or even better - a student) wants to call an issue to my attention- but if someone talking to me starts with a list of the things I am doing wrong- gee, I feel less likely to listen…
Well, as the husband, son, son in law, nephew and step son of a teacher I feel confident in saying that a lot of teachers feel a proprietary interest in the way that they run their classroom, and are maybe not as used to day to day supervision as other people in “regular” office work are. I think that might lead to some miscommunication with someone who works in a field where people feel free to walk by and tell them what they are doing wrong on a regular basis.
I think the last couple of posts might illuminate a problem that some of have had with a few teachers, which is a significant deviation from how other teachers approach the subject, and especially from how they grade. I don’t think it’s a good situation when, year after year, kids try to avoid getting Teacher X, who grades much more harshly than several other teachers who teach the same subject. I think when the deviation is substantial, it’s a failure of supervision.
In my most recent disagreement with a teacher, he had to lose so that my DS would know that house rules still apply even when the teacher’s methods usually yield certain results by the end of the semester. What mattered was the 3rd quarter grade not the teacher’s preferred timing for having assessments or posting grades for assessments already completed. I have had very few disagreements with teachers but in this case, his method of motivating my son was not working so I had to step in. Junior year is too important to let it go.