Last week, our daughter finished Grade 5, and we are extremely relieved that her teacher is out of our lives. The man, Mr. C, was a loose canon and a bully to the children, he was inconsistent, unreasonable, disrespectful; and he got scarier and weirder as the year progressed.
Some of the other moms in this teacher's class are good friends of mine, and we have coffee together most Fridays, and the stories our kids told us all matched.
We had many family meetings about what to do with this teacher, and by the time we realized just how bad he had become, the year was almost over and all we could do was tell our daughter to stay away from him, watch him, and coach her how to act around him.
There were too many afternoons where our daughter came home, opened up, and cried. Many days she had to act all day like she didn't care when Mr. C was being particularly mean to her or the class.
Some Examples:
1. Daughter read a news story about the Western Tent Caterpillar (common here in the Spring) and how some people don't like them in their gardens and how they are poisoning the caterpillars to get rid of them. She was HORRIFIED! She loves those little guys; she has played with them every Spring for seven years.
She designed and printed up flyers explaining that the Western Tent Caterpillar has a right to live here, too, and that if you poison them you poison all of us, etc., and handed them out to her friends. Mr. C wanted one, so she gave him a flyer, and after looking at it he went into detail how he loves to kill them every Spring. On and on he talked about how he hates them and how he likes to kill them in mass numbers.
Two weeks later, he brought it up again to her out of the blue, and demonstrated to her how he stomps them! She reacted wonderfully, she just shrugged and walked away. But both times she came home and cried. (On the upside, she did raise awareness to many of her friends who now call themselves "caterpillar protectors", lol.)
2. Mr. C had nicknames for some (not all) of the kids, and the nicknames were always derogatory. One little girl who always followed him around and whom he would let sit in his chair at his desk all the time in front of the class he always referred to as "Stinky."
3. He took away all control from the kids regarding their grades. This is unforgivable for a teacher to do. It didn't matter what kind of work the children did, as far as any of us can see, he graded them according to his opinion!
Our daughter never had regular homework to do. She did have (only!) three projects to work on at home, and she worked on each one for about 15-20 hours, really gave them her best. She did an amazing job each time, but never got any feedback on them. She never got them back, never got a grade on them, never heard a comment, nothing.
The quizzes and tests were never returned to the kids, reports were never seen again, nobody knew what grades they made each session. Parents had no idea how their kids were doing, we never saw homework, test grades, anything but the three projects. And never knew what grade those got, either!
The only feedback was report cards, and they seemed very low to everybody, then every child's grades slowly went up each of the three sessions. All the same.
On our first parent/teacher meeting, we asked Mr. C for a list of our daughter's grades but he couldn't give us anything. We asked to see tests and quizzes and he said they weren't available.
In our second meeting, he showed us a paragraph our daughter wrote while doing an exercise on the parts of the paragraph. It looked fine to husband and I; she made the first sentence engaging and explanatory, she gave the details in subsequent sentences, then had a nice summary sentence. Mr. C said, "She was not giving this paragraph everything she could, she should have been more much creative in the paragraph!"
My husband pointed out, "But the exercise is writing a paragraph while demonstrating the three parts; she did that perfectly fine. The assignment wasn't to be creative, it was a grammar exercise." And who can be "on" and creative all the time anyway? I thought. But that's how Mr. C. graded - on how HE THOUGHT each child should be answering.
4. When Mr. C doesn't like what you are asking, he says "I don't know what you mean" and you rephrase and repeat several times and he keeps saying, "I don't know what you mean" until you give up.
5. He always told the kids that they should come to him with questions, but then he would get mad or belittle the kid if they actually did ask him something. Our daughter asked him to explain what "special spelling 'thing'" meant (she had been absent the day before), and after several "I don't know what you mean" answers he took her outside through the outside door and screamed at her!!!
6. He hated for the children to tell their parents anything, he said they should only come to him. (Thankfully, our daughter talks to us.)
7. He made up demeaning sayings using the real names of the some of the kid in his class, like "Don't pull a Thomas" or "Don't do a Linda."
8. One of my friends has a son in a wheelchair (Mr. C particularly liked to pick on him all year) and one day after Mr. C was writing on the chalkboard, he said, "Oh YUCK" while looking at the chalk on his hands, and went over to my friend's son and wiped his hands all over the boy's shirt. (And this is just one example of the kind of disrespect that went on all year.)
I could go on and on but have to stop at some point. Thank you for reading; it felt good to write that out!
Some of the other moms in this teacher's class are good friends of mine, and we have coffee together most Fridays, and the stories our kids told us all matched.
We had many family meetings about what to do with this teacher, and by the time we realized just how bad he had become, the year was almost over and all we could do was tell our daughter to stay away from him, watch him, and coach her how to act around him.
There were too many afternoons where our daughter came home, opened up, and cried. Many days she had to act all day like she didn't care when Mr. C was being particularly mean to her or the class.
Some Examples:
1. Daughter read a news story about the Western Tent Caterpillar (common here in the Spring) and how some people don't like them in their gardens and how they are poisoning the caterpillars to get rid of them. She was HORRIFIED! She loves those little guys; she has played with them every Spring for seven years.
She designed and printed up flyers explaining that the Western Tent Caterpillar has a right to live here, too, and that if you poison them you poison all of us, etc., and handed them out to her friends. Mr. C wanted one, so she gave him a flyer, and after looking at it he went into detail how he loves to kill them every Spring. On and on he talked about how he hates them and how he likes to kill them in mass numbers.
Two weeks later, he brought it up again to her out of the blue, and demonstrated to her how he stomps them! She reacted wonderfully, she just shrugged and walked away. But both times she came home and cried. (On the upside, she did raise awareness to many of her friends who now call themselves "caterpillar protectors", lol.)
2. Mr. C had nicknames for some (not all) of the kids, and the nicknames were always derogatory. One little girl who always followed him around and whom he would let sit in his chair at his desk all the time in front of the class he always referred to as "Stinky."
3. He took away all control from the kids regarding their grades. This is unforgivable for a teacher to do. It didn't matter what kind of work the children did, as far as any of us can see, he graded them according to his opinion!
Our daughter never had regular homework to do. She did have (only!) three projects to work on at home, and she worked on each one for about 15-20 hours, really gave them her best. She did an amazing job each time, but never got any feedback on them. She never got them back, never got a grade on them, never heard a comment, nothing.
The quizzes and tests were never returned to the kids, reports were never seen again, nobody knew what grades they made each session. Parents had no idea how their kids were doing, we never saw homework, test grades, anything but the three projects. And never knew what grade those got, either!
The only feedback was report cards, and they seemed very low to everybody, then every child's grades slowly went up each of the three sessions. All the same.
On our first parent/teacher meeting, we asked Mr. C for a list of our daughter's grades but he couldn't give us anything. We asked to see tests and quizzes and he said they weren't available.
In our second meeting, he showed us a paragraph our daughter wrote while doing an exercise on the parts of the paragraph. It looked fine to husband and I; she made the first sentence engaging and explanatory, she gave the details in subsequent sentences, then had a nice summary sentence. Mr. C said, "She was not giving this paragraph everything she could, she should have been more much creative in the paragraph!"
My husband pointed out, "But the exercise is writing a paragraph while demonstrating the three parts; she did that perfectly fine. The assignment wasn't to be creative, it was a grammar exercise." And who can be "on" and creative all the time anyway? I thought. But that's how Mr. C. graded - on how HE THOUGHT each child should be answering.
4. When Mr. C doesn't like what you are asking, he says "I don't know what you mean" and you rephrase and repeat several times and he keeps saying, "I don't know what you mean" until you give up.
5. He always told the kids that they should come to him with questions, but then he would get mad or belittle the kid if they actually did ask him something. Our daughter asked him to explain what "special spelling 'thing'" meant (she had been absent the day before), and after several "I don't know what you mean" answers he took her outside through the outside door and screamed at her!!!
6. He hated for the children to tell their parents anything, he said they should only come to him. (Thankfully, our daughter talks to us.)
7. He made up demeaning sayings using the real names of the some of the kid in his class, like "Don't pull a Thomas" or "Don't do a Linda."
8. One of my friends has a son in a wheelchair (Mr. C particularly liked to pick on him all year) and one day after Mr. C was writing on the chalkboard, he said, "Oh YUCK" while looking at the chalk on his hands, and went over to my friend's son and wiped his hands all over the boy's shirt. (And this is just one example of the kind of disrespect that went on all year.)
I could go on and on but have to stop at some point. Thank you for reading; it felt good to write that out!
