Back to School Homework: Respect Your Teachers
“I won’t believe everything I hear about you if you won’t believe everything you hear about me.”
In the 4 (long) years I taught 5th-7th grade at both a public charter school and a traditional public school, this is one of the most important things I told my students’ parents.
Other lessons like “There will always be a kid in your class who smells like syrup,” and “Don’t piss off the student who has the highest probability of becoming a serial killer,” are ones that aren’t taught in teacher school. But rather, these are on-the-job skills a teacher learns her first few years on the job.
Students throughout the country are back in school, meeting their teachers, and for the most part, are excited to spend their days back in their classrooms. Teachers are still excited to set up the year’s plans and learn which kids will give them the most trouble and which kids they can trust to rat on the cheaters. The mood at school now is the best it will be the whole year. Cherish this time; it won’t last.
Soon enough, teachers will tire of the state-mandated, principal-outlined, ever-present rules and regulations. The students will tire of the banal busy work, and the parents will start to think their child isn’t learning enough in school. Around this time, some of our more creative children will start to think they have a “way out” of doing their work. A way to sneak around the system and use their parents do to their dirty work.
When this time comes, stay strong as the parent who will want to trust what your child is telling you about his or her teacher, but as the parent, listen to both sides of the story: your child’s and the teacher’s. Even the most trustworthy children can dream up situations where they can become the victim.
I once had a student who was known by his mom to be a klepto, and even though he told her I was giving him the odd stapler and tape dispenser, she believed he didn’t steal them. She believed him over me, his teacher. An adult. Her peer. According to this student’s mother, her son was telling her the truth and I was lying to her. Even though she told me he was known to steal from his other teachers. Even though he apologized to me in front of her, she believed I had tricked him into apologizing to me.
Obviously, situations like this don’t happen every day, and as a parent, you want to believe your child is not a liar. As a teacher, I had 20 other students in my class with 40 or more parents whom I had to believe trusted me. I needed those parents to be on my side. My side as an adult, an educated person, a person with integrity who wanted their child to succeed.
I’ve never met a teacher who didn’t want any one of his or her students to succeed.
In order for your child to succeed, you must trust that. With all of the government-mandated, principal-outlined, minutely-tracked statistics, teachers are having a hard time getting through the year with happy parents. Parents are taking out their frustrations on the teachers because they are the direct link to their child’s successes. Please know that your child’s teacher is just as frustrated with the changes in education. What we teachers were taught in college is not what we are allowed to implement in the classroom. The creative teaching methods and fun learning projects are few and far between. Standardized testing is the end all, be all for school’s successes today. Teacher’s hands are tied to those laws.
So when your Little Johnny comes home to tell you that Mrs. Hannigan assigned just him 10 pages of homework, ask the teacher why. I’m going to put money on the fact that Little Johnny put off doing his weekly homework until the last day and wants to weasel his way out of doing his work. And when Princess Suzy comes home complaining about how Mr. Wilson does nothing but stand in the front of the class all day and read from a Teacher’s Edition, send Mr. Wilson an email with questions about what’s going on before you “report him” to the principal. I’ll bet that a recent mandate was passed down to teachers that the majority of the student’s day should be spent in direct instruction with students at their desks.*
Please, for your child’s sake and your child’s teacher’s sake, ask before you react. Just think of what your child is telling his or her teacher about you.
Do you want her to believe everything your child says about you as 100% fact?
I didn’t think so.
•• •• •• ••
*Unfortunately, I know this to be a fact at a local elementary school.
image source: Angie Lynch
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Angie Lynch, Daily Curve & Social Media Editor. Angie is a Native Floridian without a tan, probably because she spends her days hard at work on the magical internet. For the past several years, Angie has worked way too hard at building clout as an influencer in food and margaritas as well as being a source for laughable pop culture commentary. 
I was subbing for extra money and this happened to me! (Kid asked why the teacher wasn’t going to be back for a few days. I replied that “She needed a break from school for a couple days” and that it was personal. Kid told his mom that I told him the teacher didn’t like the students and wanted to take a break from them. In reality, she was at her mother’s funeral, but I didn’t feel that I had the authority to explain that.)
The principal called me into his office and “explained how things work to me.” Luckily, no one liked the principal and the secretary explained things to the other teachers. I got more jobs, and for the rest of the day, I was pretty supported. Other teachers had been “reported” by this kid, and the idiot principal routinely believed the kid over the teachers.
Parents have GOT to take things with a grain of salt and talk to the teachers before jumping to conclusions or going along with things that just don’t sound right.
You were so lucky to have the other teachers have your back.
Well, I’m sure it helped that one of them was MY sixth grade teacher!
NICE!
My son just started full day Kindergarten and is having a bit of an adjustment phase (he’s not used to so much structure, etc). Anyway, he told me that, and I will quote my 5 year old, “The teacher talks when I’M trying to talk! That’s interrupting, Mom!!!!!” He was outraged that the teacher doesn’t let him talk while she stays quiet. Cracks me up.
Yes, he will tell us something that happened that just doesn’t sound right or like something a teacher would do/say. I think parents need to put their logic hats on when their kids are complaining about school and teachers.
That is one of the BEST stories I’ve heard in a LONG time. I told it to one of my teacher friends tonight, and she laughed like I did.
Yesterday my daughter got a discipline report home from the cafeteria monitor. First time ever. I told her that it stated on the form she was warned twice before the form was written up. She said, “well I didn’t hear her warn me.” Yeah. Right. ALL kids tell fibs to makes themselves look better or to try not to get into trouble.
Just like the “I can’t sleep good” like my daughter just came out to tell me? Yeah. FIBBER. You just don’t want to stay in bed. Even the most honest of kids know how to manipulate.
I’m a licensed school counselor, and I’ve seen this happen a number of times. I always think it’s ridiculous that parents let accusations fly before calmly and rationally inquiring what happened. Especially when the kid’s like, oh, five to seven years old.
Have you on the teachers’ sides is PRICELESS. I thank you for the teachers at your school!
As a teacher, I want to thank you for this post. I recently posted something along these same lines on my own blog. There’s nothing worse than dealing with parents who treat you like the enemy rather than someone with like-minded goals: helping their child succeed!
I’ve had way too many parents treat me as the enemy and not as someone they need to fight with.
My mom was a teacher for almost 40 years & she has a million stories about parents coming in for meetings with the principal because their child is a perfect angel when every single one of that child’s teachers has filed discipline referrals. Some people will never see their child for the brat he is … which is why he’s a brat.
She finally retired at the end of the last school year because she just couldn’t take the beauracracy anymore. It’s just as you said. It’s all about standardized testing now. She was no longer allowed to actually teach. Her only purpose was to make students memorize things they would need to do better on a multiple choice test.
Btw, she also had a kleptomaniac in one of her classes. She was a very nice little girl. Interestingly, I met her when I was using my mom’s students as test subjects for one of my psych projects. They would simply go out to her locker at the end of every week & clean out all the stuff she’d taken.
I hate standardized tests!!! I flunk them every time! It isn’t the way they should be able to test kids anymore. I always did badly on them in school and now I’m in college and doing badly on them again. When are they (whoever that is) going to figure out a better way to judge people on their knowledge, because I can sit and study for hours and know the material front to back and still fail the tests I am given…there has to be a better way!
There’s no wonder why teachers only last 3 years. It’s crazy out there.
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It was just in the news today that here in Finland the Police are investigating parents for reasons similar than in this article. The parents have filed numerous complaints that have been found unfounded and eventually started spreading rumours about the teachers and their behavior.
I used to work in an elementary school, and already back then (more than 10 years ago) there were these parents constantly complaining to school board, the principal or whoever would listen BEFORE CONTACTING THE TEACHER FIRST, just based on their kids’ stories. Needless to say, these were the kids that were in trouble quite often and always for a reason, and just tried to make themselves look better. I hope the police investigation news will make parents think a bit more before acting in the future.
OH CHEESUS that would never ever happen here, though it should. I’d love to see the tables turned when there’s someone who complains too much and is proven wrong over and over.
I was a teacher for 9 years, but took a year off to regroup and relax (HA!) as a sahm. And I miss teaching, I miss it so much. But this article reminds me why I was willing to walk away without a backwards glance at the end of the 2009-10 school year: I was tired of the bureaucracy. I was tired of administrators telling me how I was deficient in my subject area because I wasn’t teaching the way they would. (I taught Latin, and he thought I should be speaking it more in the classroom. He didn’t believe me when I explained the standards of my language, as developed by the national organization of high school and college Latin teachers and endorsed by the federal government, focused on reading and writing the language.) Mind you, this administrator had NO previous experience with my subject area. And had two (2) years teaching experience to my (at the time) five.
Sigh. I loved my kids. And I miss my kids. I didn’t even mind the parents – heck, I downright enjoyed several families! But I do not miss the bureaucracy, which is sucking all the joy out of both teaching and learning.
I took off after I had my 2nd baby because 2 babies in day care is only a few hundred dollars less than what I made every month. I planned to go back when they both started school, but now there’s no way I could go back in with what’s going on.
oh wow an educator who thinks you should be speaking Latin instead of reading and writing it worries me.
I enjoyed Ron Clark’s essay What teaches really want to tell parents
http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/06/living/teachers-want-to-tell-parents/index.html
YES. I loved what Ron Clark wrote. I actually used a lot of his methods in my classroom – he’s a smart dude.
Yeah, he opened my post-observation meeting with that, and I laughed, because I assumed he was kidding….and yeah….it went downhill, swiftly, from there. He was an ass.
I was a teacher for 3 years before I started popping out kiddos.
I look very, very young for my age, so when I started teaching I looked like I was 15. And the parents assumed I was stupid, incapable, and untrustworthy, and I DIDN’T have a principal to back me up. When I was on my first week of maternity leave with my first child, the principal threw me under the bus hardcore, to the point where I was so badly burned I still aren’t sure if I’m going back to teaching. And that was 8 years ago.
My point is that this is SO TRUE.