Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Advice needed on very difficult teacher

Well.

I suppose the summary is that Ms. T. wasn't interested in most of what I had to say, but I did get through on a couple points at the end.

The sad part came when we were talking about expectations. I told her that I'd been reading about executive function and asynchronous development. She didn't seem to have heard of either idea and I defined them and said that researchers had found that some cognitive abilities, such as math or reading abilities, can lag behind other ones, like planning ability or organizational skills. I'll skip all the details, but that line of conversation was terminated abruptly when she told me that she "would just expect all of these things to develop at the same time."

She agreed that hyphens and commas aren't mathematics. This is about "following directions." I mentioned that maybe too much of it can kill enthusiasm, but she didn't seem impressed. She admitted that she figures that at least half the fifth grade is afraid of her. She also said, "But I don't care. I'm here to teach them, not baby them and once they get to know me, they won't be afraid of me anymore." Uh-huh. I mentioned that there's a middle ground between babying and being too strict, but I didn't get the sense that that idea made much of an impression, either.

I finally got fed up and told her that I was concerned about psychological damage to my kid and that we'd be revisiting the math arrangement in 4-6 weeks.

I did get through to her on one fairly big point, and the whole fifth grade will benefit. She gave them one of those beginning-of-the-year assessments and was APPALLED at how PATHETIC everyone's answers were. I asked to see the assessment. Turned out it was an end-of-year assessment. She had only looked at "the chapter titles of the fourth grade book" and written the test on what she assumed were the details. DD did the stuff we'd gone over already and didn't know the stuff we hadn't. Oh dear. Ms. T. actually looked surprised and said, "Maybe I better talk to the 4th grade teacher." I had to keep telling her "I went through this with DS last year; I remember what they learned and what DD learned."

So she's teaching fifth graders and clearly didn't even bother to look at the fifth grade math book.

To be fair, she made some good points about skills that kids need to learn. Yet she didn't seem to think she had to actually teach these skills. My impression was that she just expected the kids to acquire them because she tells them to.

For me, the single most frustrating thing about dealing with schools is that people can be so certain about things they are completely clueless about. My DD's teachers are very skilled at smooth talking confidence in this respect. And there is simply no getting through to them. I really have to just give up, accept it, and move on. I cannot communicate with these people because they are not interested.

Argh.