I will add to aeh's list - 5. control, control, control. Most elementary teachers I have met seem to have a great need to control as many aspects of their students lives as they can. But that is also the culture of schooling.
Yep, and the big problem is that when you resist the control, they become passive aggressive and take it out on the kid. DS had a teacher who had the kids bring home a planner each day with a sentence they had written copied from the board, something like "There were two birthdays today" and a color stamped for their behavior. Half the time DS didn't even have a color in his book, and his writing was messy chicken scratches if he did it at all. We were supposed to initial the page. Not sure what the initials were supposed to signify. That we read the sentence? That we saw the color? I don't know but a time or two I forgot to initial it right away and she circled the place I was supposed to initial. When I failed to initial it again, she circled again., right over the other circle. I think on that day there wasn't even a sentence written there. I was supposed to initial something that was blank. I said "This is BS" and just stopped doing it. Every day she continued to circle where I was supposed to intial. I can understand that it is necessary for parents to see if their child got a "red" for bad behavior, or the teacher wrote the parent a note and needed to know if the parent saw it, but there was never anything like that. If he had a color, it was always green. Ultimately she went into a rant about the planner with me, saying that DS was just "so sad" that I never bothered to look at it. I was like "excuse me? I look at it every day." I asked DS about it later and he laughed like that was hilarious (DS couldn't have cared less about it). It was a power trip on the part of the teacher. Kids AND parents were expected to follow her "rules" whether they made any sense or not. She couldn't have cared less about our concerns about DS not being challenged...and was very passive aggressive. If it was "our" idea or suggestion and not hers, she wasn't going to bother with it. But we were expected to follow HER orders even though she totally slacked off in teaching our child.
Anyway, I sympathize with the OP, we have been there and I think dealing with teachers and administration like this is going to be an ongoing saga through their educational careers.
