When your child has a bad teacher

[bluestateguy]

At some point in your childhood and your youth, you will have a bad teacher or two. Sucks, but it will happen to everybody.

Just like in life you are going to have bad bosses, bad co-workers, bad next door neighbors, or even bad family members. That is an important lesson to learn in life.

Not every teacher is going to be Jaime Escalante, or Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, or Mr. Hundert in The Emperor's Club. Inspiring, electrifying, life-changing. That will always be a rarity no matter how well you compensate teachers. Very few teachers will be excellent, and very few will be bad. Most will just be satisfactory. Adequate and rather forgettable.

Now, of course we don't have to just tolerate and accept teachers who are violent, emotionally abusive or just plain negligent in their responsibilities. They should be encouraged to leave the profession, and I have said on this board before that it often takes too long to remove such teachers from their jobs. BTW, I oppose any use of standardized tests to measure teacher competency.

But there are always going to be teachers who carefully ensure that they are doing the bare minimum to keep their jobs, and make no effort at all to improve. There will always be a few who just will want to mail it in and collect a paycheck. You will find that in every profession, and that might be a good lesson to gently teach children too.

[dembotoz]

1. why you need to pay attention

education is supposed to be a parent teacher combo
if the teacher is awful the parent picks up the slack

that is what we did

[bluestateguy]

3. And I agree with you 100%

But if you point that out on DU then I have found that some posters become explosively angry, and you are accused of being "insensitive" to parents who have to work 80 hours a week, etc.

[B Calm]

2. I will never forget my 5th grade teacher. He would stand at the back of the class whenever we were

to be studying. If your head wasn't in the book, he would sneak up behind you and with his knuckles would pop you on the top of your head. He popped this little girl on the head for just looking up at the clock to see what time it was. That was the last kid he popped, because we had a substitute teacher the last few months of the school year.

[bluestateguy]

4. Well, that's abuse

and should not be tolerated.

But, a teacher who is bland, uninspiring and un-creative, unfortunatley that probably does have to be tolerated.

[B Calm]

6. My best teacher was Mr. Norris 6th grade. He was inspiring and creative. He had us laughing most of

the day. But even Mr. Norris had a paddle and was not afraid to use it while the whole class watched.

[KentuckyWoman]

5. Ineffective teachers are different than abusive teachers.

Dealing with ineffective or less effective teachers is one thing. Abusive teacher should in no way be tolerated or viewed as a life lesson. Do whatever it takes to get them out of teaching.....

[gwheezie]

7. My daughter had an abusive teacher

It was back in the day. I went to the principle and got nowhere. I met her in the parking lot and told her to go ahead and hit me like she hit a 6 year old. That ended it.

[KentuckyWoman]

9. Sorry but LOL.

We had a first grade teacher that was a nightmare. Took 10 years for the parents to convince the school board there was a problem. She managed to get herself arrested 6 months after they fired her for beating on her own grandkids - put one in ICU.

This was back in the 60's when hitting kids and being generally emotionally evil was not at all frowned upon.

[hunter]

8. It's also possible one kid's bad teacher may be another kid's good teacher.

I had a middle school teacher who was highly thought of by most of his coworkers, administration, and parents.

But he simply could not handle a skinny, squeaky, highly reactive autistic spectrum kid like me.

I had good relationships with most of my teachers, mostly because I'd learned to be invisible whenever I had to be, but not him. I'm certain he wanted to hit me sometimes.

One day he took me outside the classroom door to give me one of his trademark heart-to-heart, gentleman-to-gentleman (or gentlewoman) talks, so I ran away, jumped the school fence, and didn't return. Frantic school administrators called my mom, who reassured them I'd probably be home for dinner. (Mostly I was, until I was sixteen. Me and my siblings were what are now called "free range" children. Actually we were nearly feral children, but so were my parents.)

By coincidence my sixth grade teacher, who I adored, had become a middle school teacher and counselor, following me to the same school. I'm pretty certain she and the teacher I hated had talked, because after the running away incident there was not so much friction between me and this teacher. But I'm still fairly certain he'd written me off as a lost cause, and maybe I was.

I quit high school for college. Unfortunately, or not, it took me nine years to graduate from college, and I was "asked" to leave twice.

But I learned a hell of a lot about life along the way, I like to imagine I've learned more than most who've enjoyed more conventional paths.

My own kids had a few mediocre teachers and teachers they didn't get along with. That's life.

Expecting every teacher to be exceptionally wonderful in their dealings with every child is utterly absurd.

I worked some time in a precision machine shop. One thing you learn is that there is a lot of noise in the statistics that will never be accounted for. Some parts will simply come out wrong, and if it's not a terrible number you can't spend too much time worrying about that or you'll never get any job done. Metal is fucking complicated.

People are even more complicated.

[Gabi Hayes]

10. thanks for the unsolicited "advice," Arnie (...sounds like you, or is it Michelle?)

sans any method of dealing with the situation

should we start off by eliminating teachers' unions, in order to speed up the process of getting rid of less-than-adequate teachers as quickly as possible?