Home Child Education My Child’s Terrible Teacher Wants to Know What I Think of Her

My Child’s Terrible Teacher Wants to Know What I Think of Her

by Lisa A. Yeager

Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. In addition to our traditional advice, each Thursday, we function to collect teachers from throughout the u. S . A . Answering your schooling questions. Have a query for our teachers? Publish it inside the Slate Parenting Facebook institution.

My Child’s Terrible Teacher Wants to Know What I Think of Her 2

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This week’s Ask a Teacher panel:

  • Matthew Dicks, fifth grade, Connecticut
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My baby’s 5th-grade teacher recently despatched us an internet survey, asking dad and mom questions about classroom surroundings and trainer overall performance. It became created via and sent with the aid of the instructor. The form identifies who is answering the survey, and the survey is returned to the teacher. This surely wouldn’t be a hassle if I had amazing matters to say; however… we’ve spent the whole 12 months attempting to triumph over the trainer’s bad verbal exchange and lecture room control skills.

Her disciplinary method has constantly bordered on degrading, and at one point, needed to be modified and overseen with the aid of the predominant. As mother and father, we’d schedule conferences together with her to discover easy facts like how a brand new curriculum became being carried out inside the lecture room. Our toddler’s grades dropped dramatically from the final yr, and it has taken numerous attempts at domestic explaining ideas that the trainer bungles. Other dad and mom have had similar problems.

We’ve talked to the teacher several instances during the yr, but it’s a waste of time. When asked direct and simple questions regarding how grades are decided and how curricula are taught, she dodges the question, gives a half-solution, and pins a few blame on my infant by announcing such things as, “She ought to realize this, we went over it.”

How have I solution this survey? We need to stay with this trainer for another month. I experience as I’ve long passed down the path to try and work things out with the teacher directly. Parents were in contact with the most important approximately her, but after a sure point, the primary advised parents now not to visit him with issues approximately her.

I’d instead now not answer, then lie and be wonderful on the survey. I’m additionally baffled approximately why an instructor would send out a survey like this? It appears an atypical element to do, particularly for someone who hasn’t virtually listened to any worries in reality.

Thanks once more, and I admire any insight you can deliver me.

—Is Honesty the Best Policy?

Dear Honesty,

I’m astounded that you’ve been requested to reply to a survey requiring a name to be attached. In my college district, mother and father, college students, and instructors whole weather surveys that ask questions about several topics, but they are usually absolutely nameless and therefore very revealing in phrases of the records collected, and we take that data very significantly.

Given that your toddler can be in this trainer’s lecture room for another month, and for the reason that the teacher has but to reply to any feedback, I suppose you need to keep away from responding to the survey altogether or employ any “I’m no longer sure” or impartial alternatives at the survey, furnished that the ones are to be had.

If none of this is possible, respond definitely to the survey, however after the school year ends (and supplied that you don’t have some other toddler coming along who may additionally have this teacher), send an e-mail explaining why the survey was irrelevant, and ask her to push aside your responses.

My electronic mail is probably more strongly worded. It might perhaps incorporate the sincere solutions to the survey, but not absolutely everyone loves to kick a hornet’s nest as tons as I do.

I discover the survey unsettling, but even greater concerning is that the predominant has informed dad and mom no longer to go to him with concerns approximately this trainer. This is unprofessional, unacceptable, and places college students in your child’s school at authentic danger. Unfortunately, there are times when a teacher’s decisions impact student learning and protection, and in the one’s instances, dad and mom and college students should sense loose to seek assistance from the fundamental. I have requested five principals I recognize about the assertion made by way of yours, and all had been appalled by way of his role.

Based on what you describe in your letter, this teacher fails to meet her duties as an educator and refuses to acquire comments with open thoughts. When that failure can’t be introduced to a superior, the problem grows exponentially. Unfortunately, now, not each teacher goes to be powerful and responsive. Like in any profession, there are bad actors. But while the principal refuses to concentrate on the concerns of parents and students, the ones horrific actors end up even extra risky. If I acquired a phrase from the foremost that I couldn’t go to him with concerns about my child’s instructor, I might bespeak to the superintendent straight away.

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