Teachers have it hard enough having to deal with kids but what about their overprotective parents? These educators spill on the time they had to meddle with helicopter parents.
“Nailing The Headmistress Saved My Career!”
“My uncle was a teacher for 25 years at a fairly prestigious school and told me some fairly unbelievable horror stories, I’ll just talk about the one that sticks out in my mind.
He had taught several grades and at this point, I believe he was teaching a 6th-grade class. There was a boy in the class who was very… for lack of a better word stupid. This isn’t uncommon in schools but this kid was simply thicker than brick and couldn’t seem to grasp anything that was being taught to him, catch 22 is he had a father who was the chief of police in town and a mother who worked closely with the mayor.
Anyways – my uncle had been teaching a chapter in history and assigning homework for the day, when the boy stood up and started yelling about how stupid history was and that my uncle was dumb for attempting to teach it to them. Needless to say, the boy was sent to the office for verbally abusing a teacher, this is where the story gets somewhat interesting.
While the boy was in the office he had begun crying and started to fabricate a story about how my uncle had called him an idiot outright in the classroom and that all he did was retort saying ‘No I’m not, bozo,’ or something to that effect. He then began requesting to speak to his parents, of course, the headmaster obliged and let him call his parents and at the same time summoned my uncle to the office to discuss what was going on. Five minutes later as my uncle had just finished explaining what had happened both the boy’s parents burst into the office, running their mouths ,the husband attempted to arrest him with his wife basically spitting in my uncle’s face as she was yelling at him.
All the while their boy was sitting there smiling and apparently laughing as my uncle was taken from the room by the chief of police, all pretty absurd. As you can imagine with a full room of witnesses in the children, the actual story came to light fairly quickly but instead of apologizing and trying to save face, the husband began telling a tale of how my uncle had resisted arrest and reacted forcefully and struck him as he was attempting to gain control over him in the office.
I found out later that both the parents approached the headmistress after the fact and offered her an ultimatum, to agree with what they were saying or they would make her life a living nightmare – all instead of simply admitting they were wrong. The husband lost his job and the wife was severely demoted to desk clerk after everyone figured she tried to use her position as leverage in the situation.
And as if this whole thing wasn’t humorous enough my uncle still swears to this day ‘Nailing the headmistress saved my life, definitely my career.’
What a lovely man he is.”
All Work and No Play
I’m not a teacher, but I’m in high school and I directed some of the kids in my school’s middle school division in a play of Treasure Island. One day, when we weren’t allowed access to the theater, we did a rehearsal at the house of this girl (let’s call her G). Her mother (let’s call her M) invited us to come over, and at first, I was wary as something always seemed a bit ‘off’ about her, like she was always in an insane rush to get her daughter home after all of our regular rehearsals. But they had a very large house and I didn’t want to give up the space, so I agreed to do the rehearsal there.
Once we were there, M politely greeted us, but G was holed up in her room. I asked if she could come and join us, but M kept insisting we start the rehearsal without her. I explained to her that G was one of the most important parts of the play, and it would be hard to practice without her, but M just kept saying that she had work to do and wasn’t available.
Finally, after about half an hour, G came out to meet us, but her crazy mother told us that she could only stay for 15 minutes and then she had to go back to her work. G then turned to her mother and said, ‘I don’t have any work’ to which M responded, ‘yes you do, sweetie‘ in the most passive-aggressive way I’ve ever heard someone talk to their child. I decided to stay out of it, and we started rehearsing with her.
I then opened my laptop to show them a video of what they did, but M happened to be walking past at the time, and she ran over and slammed my laptop’s lid down, shouting ‘No Media!’ repeatedly, and then lifted it up and ran away with it somewhere. It was my computer, so I followed her and asked for it back, and she carefully explained that they were a ‘no media’ family and that it’s important that G isn’t exposed to that. She then said that her daughter should get back to work anyway, but I said we needed five more minutes.
When I got back to G, she said ‘Isn’t my mom so annoying’ I wasn’t sure how to respond but G saw the uncertainty on my face and kept talking about her mother. It turned out that G wasn’t allowed to watch TV, go on any computer, or even listen to music on an iPod, just do her schoolwork and read books that had already been read by her parents. She was in 6th Grade, so of course she didn’t have that much work to do, but her mother would make her study her notes from the day every day, and would frequently make her do homework again as it wasn’t long enough. G could have been getting straight As with less than half of the work she had to do, so I told M that she shouldn’t put so much pressure on her daughter, and she responded to that by kicking me out of the house. Her parents got divorced a year later and her father has full custody, and I couldn’t be happier.”
He’s Gonna Grow Up To Have A Big Head
“I’m sure that I’m too late to not be buried, but a colleague of mine in my school has had the most helicopter parent I have seen in my eight years of education.
This mother, of middle eastern descent in a 96% Caucasian school, felt that in first grade each school and grade level should be voting for a child that was the voted master of their peers. She felt that he would one day be the president of the United States and that his early elementary public education should reflect so. She felt that he should be voted upon to rule the rest of the grade level delegating responsibilities to his peers. Mind you he had just turned 5 and had skipped kindergarten based upon parent request in spite of his kindergarten level formative assessment levels.
She forced her child’s teacher to have him present PowerPoint each month on complicated issues such as segregation and photosynthesis. She would come in on these days to videotape these presentations that were clearly done by her. She would keep him after school 3 times a week to make sure his reading points not only met what was expected but were 10 times what was expected. She left the district this year with her children in search of a private school where a second grader could be voted as the master of all grades K-6 to learn leadership of his peers. Bless her heart.”
Lining Him Up For Failure
I taught for a year at a private school because I used to live in an area with a lousy job market. I had an autistic student in my 8th-grade class who functioned at about a 3rd-grade level. He was in my regular class for no other reason than the fact that his father paid tuition to this small private school so he felt like we were at his command. Keep in mind, I have no special ed certification. I’m a General Ed English teacher.
I had to prepare an entirely different curriculum for him, and yet ‘include’ him in the class. I worked harder on this one student than I did on the rest of the class (so very unfair to the rest of the students, but I’m only one person), so I started cutting back to be fair to the rest of the class, who also had parents paying tuition and who were entitled to quality education.
The guy emails me almost hourly wanting daily reports of his kid’s progress. Ain’t nobody got time for that, so I ignore them. I email him weekly, max. He asks me to give his son harder homework, and that he would help him complete it. I do so, the kid turns in work that shows he had no idea what he was doing and got no help from home, so I go back to the regular level of work. Dad freaks out.
Then he starts working on getting him into a high school. A few people come to observe him in class and ask me about his levels. Dad thinks.. honestly thinks that his son can pass the literacy test (this is in Canada, where students have to pass this test to graduate from high school).
Nothing is worse for a kid than placing him in an environment where he cannot succeed. This student had talents and skills and was an overall nice kid but he was never going to pass that literacy exam. So, I was honest and frank with the observers (I did nothing more than verify what they saw with their own eyes anyway). I got thanked for this (and for all the extra work I put into his child) by getting harassing emails even after I had resigned from my position at that school and well into the summer.
I feel for him in a way. I’m sure it isn’t easy being a parent to a special needs child and I know he was in denial when it came to his abilities and limitations but… is that really the teacher’s fault?
He’s A Biter.
“I wasn’t really a teacher, I worked in daycare. But they called me a teacher. Anyway, when my class was two (I worked there for three years, and had the same class the whole time, for the most part) I had this one kid whose mother made me want to strangle her. In fact, I wanted to strangle the entire family.
My boss had absolutely no spine and denied nothing to the parents. Nothing. So this one parent wanted me to track her son’s entire day and write a log. Every day. If I didn’t have at least a full sheet of paper, she would flip the heck out. I had to record every little thing this kid did, including every word he used, times, etc.
And the kid was an absolute terror. He was a big, spoiled brute. He was bigger than most of the four-year-olds. Initially, I would include his behavior problems in his ‘report’ but the mom got so mad at me–her angel couldn’t POSSIBLY have hit little jimmy in the head with a firetruck! Never mind that Jimmy has a goose egg on his forehead. I was just trying to blame my negligence on her child. Ugh.
She was usually the very last parent to pick up, usually late (sometimes being as much as half an hour after closing) and so I would normally be alone when I’d get the verbal lashing as I either opened the daycare or closed. Apparently, the other teachers didn’t get so much abuse as I did.
The situation only stopped when another parent had been a little late as well and was taking their child to the bathroom before they left for home. He comes out with his daughter as this woman is calling me all sorts of horrible things because I forgot something in the note from the day before and blah blah blah.
The dad is horrified when he comes out with his daughter and the woman shuts up after that. After that point, either he or his wife was always there until the big brute was picked up and I think either he spoke to her or he spoke to my boss, but a few weeks later she pulls her kid out of the daycare.
As far as I know, he wasn’t allowed back into any center in the area because of his mom. And his biting.”
She Asked Her For What?
“I had a student last year whose mother was always claiming he had some health issue that was pretty serious. While I hate calling people liars, she would make it obvious. The best example I can give is her claiming he had severe asthma. I made every accommodation I could for this kid. Every time he complained of chest pains, I would send him to the nurse immediately.
I began to wonder when I would see him at recess running around like a maniac without any complaints. He only got chest pains during a test or whenever it was convenient for him. Another example was during science when we were working with microscopes. He thought it would be ok to just run around the room. Of course I kicked him out and told him he flunked science. Well at the end of the day I had a change of heart and made him read a chapter out of the science book and write a summary for homework. The next day he comes in with this elaborate 3d model of the chapter and his summary is written in pen and the writing looks like a grown woman’s, not a fourth-grade boy. I ask him to tell me about the chapter and of course, he can’t so I called his mom. She proceeds to tell me that he spent hours on this thing and she watched him do it. I call her out and explain he can’t tell me anything. She admits she helped but feels there is nothing wrong with her writing for him or constructing the model.
She was and still is psycho. She called me last week asking for $30 for rent money. I can’t wait until he goes to middle school.”
