Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy How can this be so hard?! Rant ahead...

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.

How can this be so hard?! Because these are the people who are in charge of most public schools in the US: In D.C., a 13-year-old piano prodigy is treated as a truant instead of a star student

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local...-bdfb-de4104544a37_story.html?tid=pm_pop

Just sending hugs. This is basically where we are too. I wish I had at least 1 answer... but I think it's just luck of the draw in terms of the teacher/HOD/staff you get to work with.

This is difficult because we are acknowledging and supporting the individual differences in our children, in a culture which increasingly rewards uniformity. Tall poppies are cut down.

An international push toward uniformity is seen in many areas. Parents of gifted children see it in education, other parents may not. Doctors may see it in changes of naming conventions: anatomical features/structures which once reflected the name of their discoverer have been renamed to reference their location/function. Peyer's patches - aggregated lymphoid nodules; Brunner's glands - duodenal glands.

We may be on the road toward becoming a uniform society, where no one may stand out of his/her own volition, without negative consequence.

Would you like fries and ketchup with that Soylent Green?

Thanks, everyone. Misery loves company, but it's heartbreaking to hear all these familiar stories.

The five point list is perfect. In our case, control and cognitive ability are the main problems with the difficult administrator. Interestingly I find the greatest resistance comes from the educators with children and I wonder how much of that is a personal reaction to what they see as a suggestion that my child is more able than theirs. I'm suggesting no such thing, but the reactions seem so personal/emotional.

I sought assistance from another administrator who promised to follow up. Crickets. No response to my emails, either, and DD6 is already complaining about math (and doing the same worksheets as everyone else). This is going to be a very long year.