Irena, DH is an OB and I think he would agree with you. An educated patient with opinions about her care may be harder, but he actually appreciates it tons -- as long as she is respectful and not irrational.
Yes-- and in all of my years of teaching (uni) and my mom's (primary, both public and private), this was what we observed to be true for 70-90% of our colleagues, too.
The problem is that on the one hand, that 10-30% of rotten apples on the teacher side ruin parents for rational discourse, and that on the other, about the same percentage of students (uni) and parents (primary and I'd assume also secondary) are also irrational.
I had never actually run into a truly irrational/difficult teacher until my DD was a high schooler. Of course, there are definitely lackluster, barely competent models. There are in most professions. For HG people, teaching isn't exactly filled with high octane processing speeds, to say the least...
but at least in primary, the loving and conscientious teachers can often make it work anyway-- for 99% of students, anyway.
We
do ask teachers to do too much now. We do. Mainstreaming and inclusion are, on balance, both right and good-- but they DO create problems within classrooms when it comes to effective teaching.
Remove tracking/ability grouping and there is an additional and very critical hurdle.
Frankly, the largest reason that GOOD teachers have left (and continue to do so) seems to me to be the focus on testing-testing-testing. A lot of the good ones become so repulsed by that
machine that they eventually quit thinking that they can be Don Quixote, and find something else to tilt at.
