As a teacher, what is the most ridiculous thing that you have to deal with from parents who think that their child is 'a perfect angel'? How did you deal with it?
Polly Smith, Know the odd thing about some stuff
Answered 15h agoWow, so many…
The teenager who had been systematically rude to me until I had enough, gave him fair warning and ended up chucking him out of class. His mother’s response? That I had to understand that he was a Gemini…
The junior sports champion, 10 years old, who took out his mobile (forbidden) in class (forbidden) and made a call (super forbidden) in front of everyone just to show me he could, so I took away the mobile. His mother’s response? That her son needed a mobile so that they could “locate” him at all times, and she lodged a complaint against me with the headmaster because of my authoritarian attitude and “abuse of power” (I conserve the letter somewhere) and demanded the phone back before the reglamentary 24 hours. The headmaster told me to give it back at that moment. I didn’t.
The teenage girl who I asked politely to put her mobile away, and she told her mother that I’d called her a “stupid bitch”. I hadn’t and I would never. The headmaster believed me; the mother didn’t and told me her daughter never told lies…
The father who stormed in demanding to know why I hadn’t chosen his son to prepare for the First Certificate (Cambridge) exam. I explained that we only selected around 50% of the students, the ones that were best at English. He was indignant that “no one had informed” him that his son wasn’t doing well at English. I checked the child’s report and said gently, “but he failed English last term”, thinking maybe the parents were separated and that the mother had signed the report, “I suppose that’s his mother’s signature”. “That’s MY signature”, he shouted, “I sign the reports but don’t expect me to read them!”.
The dyslexic child who did NOTHING at all in any class except stare sullenly at his desk. His mother told us we had to make the effort to understand that his dyslexia was a “gift”. He aparently didn’t have to make any effort. One day he went down to the garden, took a large stone, went back upstairs and threw it from the class window, narrowly missing the gardener’s head (incidently the gardener had previously told him off about something). The mother’s response? That we had misunderstood, that it must have been an accident.
The 12 year old that failed EIGHT subjects in his first year at high school. The mother’s response: could we please change the school uniform, because it didn’t suit him. Seriously. The father’s response? None. He took a work call in the middle of the interview and held up his hand for us to shut up.
The 10 year old who stood up in class and sang “Cara al Sol” (the Franco-ist fascist anthem) all the way through ignoring my requests for him to stop. The parents’ response? That I must have misunderstood, for where would he have learnt that…?
The child who I made change places in class to stop him chatting to his best friend. The father’s response: who does the teacher think she is to make my son change places in class? Above all, it had better not happen again.
The child that insulted everyone in class: you’d be teaching something, the class more or less in silence, and you’d suddenly hear “Bitch”, “Dirty slag”, “Bastard”, etc. We were supposed to ignore it because the parents and the school psychologists had decided that it was an uncontrollable urge. The kid himself told me that he had just been trying to get expelled and that it had got out of hand. By then I didn’t bother to tell anyone: they wouldn’t have believed me anyway.
WHAT DID I DO?!!!! Gave up teaching kids.
Topic: Teacher's horror stories (Read 802 times)