My niece's 4th grade teacher

[MrsEclipse]

I have to confess, I don't get how that's two letter grades either. Was the assignment not worth 100 and if it was, was there no way of earning 100?

We were using this scale:
90-100 is A
80-89 is B
70-79 is C
60-69 is D
>59 is F

In my part of the world this is a given standard (sometimes I forget how wide the world wide web is.)

The assignment was indeed worth 100. 100 minus twenty is 80, which is A to B

99 minus 20, however, is 79. 99 is A, and 79 is C.

If, given this basic information, you now understand, then congratulations. You are now overqualified to be my high school English teacher.

I hope you don't think I consider you stupid. I certainly don't, no sir.



Also, to Misanthropical: My mom got herself a letter from a lawyer, complete with fancy letterhead, stating something or other. I forget what, but it was something along the lines of the school violating my civil rights and what action she could take if it persisted.

Whenever there was a Parents Meeting, she opened her notes. On the first page was the letter. She let it linger a good, long while before finding the appropriate page. For some reason, it made the school system.

The situation you describe is pretty much how my mother is. That's why I know your pup is going to be just fine.

[Misanthropical]

Hyena Dandy, I had saved all the paperwork and did threaten legal action, it was only at that point that they felt the need to tell me about a school a little further away that had a program just for children with my son's type disabilities.

I and my husband were very upset that they had not told us that in the beginning and saved my son a lot of grief. He has just recently told me about things that went on that I had no idea about and if I had I would have brought lawyers in instead of just saying I was looking into it.

I sent him to that school with a high self esteem and feeling of self worth and they broke it down in a couple of years time so bad that that it had to be rebuilt from the beginning. I do believe it would have been a lot of worse if he hadn't of had one teacher in his corner who tried to shield him from some of what was going on.

My daughter, who has no disabilities, went to the same school for awhile and told me that the principal was always grabbing kids and screaming in their faces. She never had it happen to her, but she saw it.

MrsEclipse, I actually had an attorney at the time. Of course,, he was just representing me in a traffic case, but they didn't know that.

You're sweet and I do hope my pups turn out okay and know that I was always standing guard for them.

[Andara Bledin]

The first rule, albeit weird, actually reminds me of a teambuilding exercise. In Field Training, we had to do everything the same. It wasn't for some diabolical reason; it was that, when we started doing things the same way, or in a case like this when someone wasn't following the rules-the equal punishment of the group motivated us to help the other person do it right.

Of course, for 8-9 yr olds, the lesson is probably lost.

Well, you see, she's probably doing it for precisely the same reasons.

In the US, our scholastic system is still primed for a primarily industrial focus, meaning that working as a team and following the orders of your superiors are actually very important lessons and in some industries can save lives.

Unfortunately, the world has moved on and while we still have a lot of industrial positions, we're no longer a primarily industrial nation. For whatever reason, we haven't done much to shift our teaching over to the information age standards, and the majority of our teachers tend to teach with the same methods their teachers used. Some study (lazy today, so not looking it up) found that we pass on gender biases through the same manner, too.

We took the matter up the chain of command and are now going to be meeting with this teacher. I plan on ripping him a new a-hole.

Got get him, Mis!

And then tell us all the juicy details.

Of course, I don't always side with my children, but if I think my children are being mistreated I will bring down the Wrath of God.

That's called the Wrath of Mom.

Much scarier. *nods knowingly*

Thankfully, the worst of the teachers I had were mostly just, well... to be honest, they were the unpopular kids who did jerky things to try to fit in with the "cool" kids.

Not the actual cool kids, because actual cool kids don't pick on the geeks and outcasts. Only the faux wannabes do that. And I had a few teachers that fell squarely in the non-cool, and trying too hard to act like what they though would be considered cool, section.

Of course, since I was an outcast and intellectual, so I was a prime target, and a couple of teachers picked on me for being me. Thankfully, I'm pretty thick-skinned in that regard, so it didn't bother me too terribly.

I did have one teacher, however, who gave me detention because another kid threw clay at me. Yeah, I got detention because another kid misbehaved. The other kid got detention, too, but I lost any respect I had for that teacher. And my brother had to transfer out of his class 2 years later because he held a grudge. I suspect this was another case where a teacher resented me for being smart. Or maybe he just hated me because I was taller than him. He was that kind of insecure prick.

My brother, however, ran afoul of our guidance councilor's complete lack of doing her job. I'm a planner, so I didn't have any issued with her incredible apathy towards her position, but my brother lacks the ability to plan for much of anything. So, he gets to the end of his senior year, and lo, he doesn't have enough credits! He had two free periods that year, and she didn't think to maybe tell him that he hadn't fulfilled the scholastic requirements.

Our mother, never one to let things like this pass, had a word with the principal. Thankfully, our principal was a serious educator. He had actually taken the time to complete his doctorate in education while presiding over the school (and he was an active participant), and really cared about the kids. He looked over my brother's transcript, acknowledged that the councilor wasn't on the ball at all, and waived the requirement so that my brother could graduate on time, since he was already aware of my brother's ability to pass any necessary classes.

He and my brother were actually on quite good terms, since my brother was a rebel with a brain (he broke rules, but not usually in ways that would net him legitimate punishments), so he ended up visiting the principal fairly often, and after reviewing the incidents, the principal would side with my brother about half of the time.

^-.-^

[Misanthropical]

The chair incident My husband and I went to the high school and talked with both the principal and the teacher. The teacher claimed the two boys in the hall were going to start fighting and it was escalating when they walked in. He told us they were not responding to him telling them to knock it off and sit down. So, he threw the chair in an empty corner to get their attention and defuse the situation. Yeah, you believe that, right? I didn't either.

Anyway, I was sitting at least 10 feet away from the teacher, but I made him very nervous, because I hardly said a word, but was giving him the "I will eat your soul" look and started taking notes. It was funny watching him try to see even a little bit of what I was writing, but even if he could see what I wrote it would make no sense to him, since I write in my own form of short hand.

He claimed he only told my son to keep quiet or get kicked out because my son interrupted him getting on another student. Okay, back up the crazy train, because we both know that's bull. I gave him the look of death and he back peddled to say it might have taken my son that long to get over the shock of the chair being thrown and was just voicing his displeasure and he (the teacher) probably shouldn't have said that. Gee, you think?

I then asked him if he told my son that he had the right to hit a student. He told us that they had discussed if he had the right to hit a student if a student hit him first and the answer is yes. There is a law on the books in PA that teacher may hit a student if the student hits the teacher first, but the teacher has to show that the student had the intention of hitting the teacher and not someone behind the teacher.

He also claimed he had no idea that my son had any disabilities. Why people insist on lying to me I will never know. Every single one of my son's teachers got the paperwork on his disabilities the first week of school as mandated along with the guidelines on how to handle it if it becomes an issue, which it rarely does. Funny how all his other teachers got the paperwork. I made the man jump when I slammed my pen on my notepad, because lying to me is not the best way to get on my good side, especially when one is treading on thin ice as it is. My husband gave me the look of "please don't kill him" and the meeting went on.

At the end of it, he apologized to me about scaring my son. I told him he was apologizing to the wrong person. It is my son he should be apologizing to. He then went on to say the chair didn't come near my son. I told him if it had hit my son we would have met under vastly different circumstances and he should find a better way to get the attention of the class because someone could have gotten hurt and he should know better. He decided that was the best time to scamper off.

The principal then apologized to us and I told her while we were upset, it was my son who should be getting the apologies. She then rambled on for an hour on unrelated stuff till we finally got out of there. No wonder my son finds her annoying, she doesn't know when to stop talking.

[Nohbody]

I did have one teacher, however, who gave me detention because another kid threw clay at me. Yeah, I got detention because another kid misbehaved. The other kid got detention, too, but I lost any respect I had for that teacher.

I don't know when you were in school (or where, but that's not relevant to this post), but nowadays more than a few districts have that (punish both parties, regardless of fault) as standard policy.

Down that road lies Fratching territory, however, so I shan't go there.

[Andara Bledin]

I don't know when you were in school (or where, but that's not relevant to this post), but nowadays more than a few districts have that (punish both parties, regardless of fault) as standard policy.

Well, as I mentioned, that teacher didn't like me anyway. He was just waiting for an excuse to do something to me. I wouldn't give him one 'cause I wasn't any sort of troublemaker, other than being a nonconformist.

^-.-^

[EricKei]

I wouldn't give him one 'cause I wasn't any sort of troublemaker, other than being a nonconformist.

^-.-^

A NONCOMFORMIST?! How DARE you! What a horrible thing to be

I do seem to recall that primary schools, in particular, construed any lack of conformity as "overt disobedience" or even hostility automatically.

Hell, isn't that what Political Correctness (emphasis on the first word quite intentional) is all about? Unquestioning conformity?