These teachers talk about the nightmare parents who won't let them do their jobs.
They Wouldn’t Stop Messaging Her
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“I was working with a class of gifted high school students taking a summer course. During a field trip, one of my students needed to go to a doctors appointment and would be picked up early by her parents. The only way to contact the group on the field trip was my cell phone, so the parents got my personal number.
In the week left in the summer course, I received 23 text messages and 15 calls asking why their 10th-grade daughter had not called them back.”
Her Excuse Didn’t Make The Situation Better
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“I had a student a few years ago whose mom would email all his teachers every day wanting to know what we had done in class. It got so bad that the school eventually told her that she could only email once a week.
Later that year, the student turned in a research paper and the first paragraph had been stolen word for word from a website. I printed out the web page, gave the kid a zero, and wrote a referral for cheating. Hours later, the mom emails me, furious that I would accuse her son of cheating. I explained the situation, and she told me, ‘Oh, it wasn’t his fault! He had been too busy to type it, so I did it for him. I wanted to spruce up the intro a little bit, so I added that little extra bit. I guess I forgot to add the source.’ Seems legit.”
She Was So Racist
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“I work in college housing.
Last year, I worked at a small mid-western university, the demographics are 90 percent white kids. A staff member was from Ghana and had set up this international student sponsorship program with the government officials; it was awesome. The students weren’t to arrive until a week or so after college classes started. I informed my student staff of this and also told them to inform their residents that people of different cultures have different customs, and to make sure they feel welcome to campus.
I received a call from a mother shortly after student staff had their meetings, saying that her son was concerned that his new roommate would smell. I inquired further, and she said that her son told her that her new roommate was from an African country and the mother did ‘research’ online and found that international students tend to not bathe as frequently as Americans. She then suggested that we house them separately from the American students.
I told her we do not assign rooms by race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. She again brought up housing them together. So I said something along the lines of, ‘Excuse me ma’am but, you’re suggesting that we separate the African students from the American students. Do you recognize the historical significance of how utterly insulting this is?'”
His Mother Was A LOT
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“I had a student last year where his mother was always claiming he had some health issue that was serious. While I hate calling people liars, she would make it obvious. The best example I can give is her claiming he had severe asthma. I made every accommodation I could for this kid, including every time he complained of chest pains I would send him to the nurse immediately. I began to wonder when I would see him at recess running around like a maniac without any complaints. He only got chest pains during a test or whenever it was convenient for him. But I never questioned it because I just didn’t want to even try to argue.
Another example is during science, we were playing on microscopes and he thought it would be ok to just run around the room. Of course, I kicked him out and told him he flunked science. Well at the end of the day I had a change of heart and made him read a chapter out of the science book and write a summary for homework. The next day he comes in with this elaborate 3D model of the chapter and his summary is written in pen and the writing looks like a grown woman’s, not a fourth-grade boy. I ask him to tell me about the chapter and of course, he can’t, so I call his mom. She proceeds to tell me that he spent hours on this thing and she watched him do it. I call her out and explain he can’t tell me anything. She admits she helped, but feels there nothing wrong with her writing for him or constructing the model.
She was and still is psycho. She called me last week asking for $30 for rent money. I can’t wait until he goes to middle school.”
She Refused To Believe Her Son Was The Problem
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“When special needs students are in school, they participate in special education programs that generate what are called special education plans (SEPs).
I had a student who was lazy but also happened to have a learning disability. These can co-occur in the same student. It’s uncommon, but it happens. I had worked extensively with the special ed department about this kid, trying to help him out. For the most part, I couldn’t help him with his work because he wouldn’t even attempt it. Even if it was just he and I in a room alone together, he would loosely hold a pencil in his hand and stare into space, refusing to read, think, or write. (Yes, he was capable of all three). He was waiting for me to give up, but I kept trying. I think this annoyed him, but I still didn’t get much out of him.
His mother was in the special ed department at a nearby school, so she knew the ropes and all the laws.
Her son either had her hoodwinked, or she didn’t want to fight with him and preferred to fight with us instead. So we had to explain his grades. She would start with the saccharine sweet act, and then get increasingly angry and demanding and eventually go over a teacher’s head, insisting she’d been so reasonable. It was a pattern.
My coping strategy was to be as polite as possible, meet her demands, and document.
Before all was said and done, I was e-mailing her on a nearly daily basis about her child (‘Dave did fine today’) and waiting for an hour most days each week in an empty classroom. She wanted me to tutor him after school, but then there was always some reason she couldn’t come get him and he had to ride the bus home. Phone calls were a fairly regular occurrence, too.
Another teacher eventually said he heard she was going to make us fill out his SEP form (40 or so accommodations on that form, and it’s different for each of the 40 students with SEPs) from memory or some madness.
Just in case, I memorized his form and his student ID to fill in at the top. I stayed late one night for that one.
She eventually managed to strong-arm most of the other teachers to bump him up from failing to passing grades. I had plenty of documentation amassed on my efforts to help him, so I could justify failing him. So they transferred him out of my class.”
She Brought Him Down
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“I taught ESL to a bunch of high schoolers, many of which were at an SAT level. There was this one kid who was fluent and would write wonderful essays in my class.
However, his mother wasn’t satisfied. She forced him to write a 10,000-word essay every single day. Now, she had never learned a foreign language, didn’t speak English, and I don’t think she even graduated from college. But she would (through her son and other translators) give me an earful on how I was being too easy on the students because I wasn’t making them do four hours of homework a night.
And this poor kid, this unfortunate, 14-year-old kid who was fluent in two languages and was ready to take the SATs in a language not his own ended up getting worse and worse at writing. He would repeat things again and again just to get the word count because his mother would check the essays every night. Well, she’d check the numbers. She wouldn’t be able to read the paper. He would lie and make up stories, interject them in weird places. He did ABSOLUTELY MISERABLY in his exams because he wouldn’t take my advice to ‘stop writing when you’ve run out of things to say.'”
She Was Only In Second Grade
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“When I was teaching second grade, we took a field trip to our district’s vocational school so the kids could get a sense for the wide array of career choices available. One parent would not allow her daughter to attend because she was so afraid her daughter might take a liking to one of the non-collegiate career tracks (horticulture, culinary arts, etc.) and ruin her predestined path to medical school. Second. Grade.”
She Ruined It For Everyone
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“The eighth graders at my middle school used to take a trip to a theme park or something every year, but you weren’t allowed to go if you were failing any of your classes.
Well, some kid’s mom called and whined that her kid couldn’t go (because he was failing) and it was discriminatory towards him and ended up getting the trip canceled for everyone. His mom should have been more focused on getting him help rather than ruining things for the kids who did try.”
“It Was Just Supposed To Be Fun”
“I teach kindergarten at a private school that severely sucks up to parents. I gave my students a fun Halloween activity that was basically a color by numbers on a hundreds chart. If they followed the directions, it turned out to be a monster.
I hung them up for parents to see and one of the moms saw her daughters paper and was so disappointed and told me, ‘she can color better than that, you just have to push her.’ She’s five years old, and it is just supposed to be fun.”
Don’t Do Your Kids’ Homework
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“I teach middle school English at a public school in Texas. I brought a mom in several months ago to discuss how her son had been plagiarizing. But she only wanted to talk about his acting career. She pulled out a leather-bound portfolio stuffed with acting/modeling photos of her little angel and talked at me for an hour about each one.
Cut to this week. He turns in a paper about his strongest childhood memory. It’s a two page summary of every famous person he’s acted with and what movies I would know them from now. Looking at the writing style and level of detail, the mom CLEARLY wrote the essay.”
She Is So Overbearing
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“I currently have a sixth-grade student whose stepmother emails me on a daily basis. Good kid: A in my class, no behavior problems, but yet I’ve had 94 emails from her this year.
Typically they are unnecessary and I just want to ask her, ‘DO YOU EVER TALK TO YOUR SON?’ He could answer 95 percent of her questions! Yet, she still sends me emails asking things like, ‘What was the situation that caused my son to be marked tardy to your class?’ and ‘There is an assignment in the grade bookmarked with a 0/0. It’s titled Extra Credit Bonus Points. Please advise on how this will affect his grade.’
Also, our students’ school profiles where we log grades keep track of when their parents log into their profile. This student’s shows that, since August, his mother has checked his grades 717 times.”
Straight A’s, Even If They Just Sleep
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“I am a teacher at a private school in South Korea. Every one of my students’ parents is a CH-47 Chinook of a parent. So the courses I teach are specifically geared for the students who want to study in the United States during college. I teach classes to prepare them for the SATs, I teach English conversation to help them be more fluent, and I teach in an American university style to help them get used to the format. The thing is, I have no control over grades.
In principle, I do because they are my classes, but the reality is different. Because it’s a private school, every one of the parents pays money to get their kids in and pay a lot more for them to be part of this international program. This means that if their kid isn’t doing well, they have a pretty good chance of packing them up and taking them to a competing school. So because of this every one of my students gets near perfect grades. Not because they earned them, but because my principal has flat-out told me that they all have to pass and do well even if they only ever sleep in class (and about half of them do).”
He Took Drastic Action
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“I am a music teacher for kindergarten through 12th grade. For discipline, I use the three-strikes-you’re-out method. With Kindergarten I use the ‘happy face/sad face’ on the white board, dependent upon behavior each day.
I had a parent sneak into my classroom during my lunch period and erase his son’s name from the ‘sad face list’ on the board, claiming that he ‘got a feeling’ while he was at work that his son was being mistreated at school. He could only believe that I had wrongfully accused his son of something, because his son was an angel. He picked the lock to come in and ‘defend’ his son!”
The Principal Wouldn’t Stand Up To Her
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“My girlfriend is a teacher and last year one of her co-workers had a mom that was convinced that it wasn’t her sweet baby who was the problem, it was the teacher (of course). So she asks the principal to sit in on the class, and she allows it.
This goes on for months, despite the teacher saying numerous times to the principal that the lady is crazy. The principal is more worried about the PTA than the teachers and lets the woman keep coming. Finally, the teacher says, ‘if she is still here tomorrow, I am leaving and not coming back until she is gone.’ The next day she was still there, so the teacher left. The lady kept coming for two weeks of substitutes before the principal finally said she had to stop coming.”
She Was Awful
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“I worked in a daycare. When my class was two years old, I had this one kid whose mother I wanted to strangle. In fact, I wanted to strangle the entire family.
My boss had absolutely no spine and denied the parents nothing. Nothing. So this one parent wanted me to track her son’s entire day and write a log. Every day. If I didn’t have at least a full sheet of paper, she would flip the heck out. I had to record every little thing this kid did, including every word he used, times.
And the kid was an absolute terror. He was a big, spoiled brute. He was bigger than most of the 4-year-olds. Initially, I would include his behavior problems in his ‘report,’ but the mom got so mad at me. Her angel couldn’t POSSIBLY have hit little Jimmy in the head with a firetruck! Never mind that Jimmy has a goose egg on his forehead. I was just trying to blame my negligence on her child. Ugh.
She was usually the last parent to pick up, usually late (sometimes being as much as a half an hour after closing) and so I would normally be alone when I’d get the verbal lashing as I either opened the daycare or closed. Apparently, the other teachers didn’t get as much abuse as I did.
The situation only stopped when another parent had been a little late as well and was taking their child to the bathroom before they left for home. He comes out with his daughter as this woman is calling me all sorts of horrible things because I forgot something in the note from the day before.
The dad is horrified when he comes out with his daughter and the woman shuts up after that. After that incident, either he or his wife was always there until the big brute was picked up and I think either he spoke to her or he spoke to my boss because a few weeks later she pulls her kid out of the daycare.
As far as I know, he wasn’t allowed back into any center in the area because of his mom. And his biting.”
These Parents Wield All The Power
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“I’ve had a horrible helicopter parent week. The power that these parents have in coming into the classroom and changing how things are done is scary.
I had three kids who were caught turning in the same paper, and after giving them zeros for the assignment they got their parents to form a witch hunt. One of the parents rallied all the other parents in the class who all came in to hold a meeting about me and how I teach, even though none of them have been in my class or have talked with me personally. This is an advanced class and the LOWEST grade is a C, which is amazing. I’m actually proud of all of my students.
Anyway, parents got the administration to have me allow the kids to redo the paper and I now must be evaluated because of the things these parents say I do in my class. Meanwhile, I still have to teach these kids and act as a professional toward them, which I will. This behavior is unacceptable as a parent.”
He Freaked Out For The Dumbest Reason
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“Almost every year, no matter what book or theme I go with, I have at least one nutjob parent who thinks it is inappropriate for some reason or another.
I had just finished teaching a unit on the Holocaust. I’m not one to coddle students, so we went to the museum and saw a lot of documentaries and read books and accounts that didn’t hide or sugar coat anything. I was proud of how they handled it.
Next, I started a unit on The Hunger Games. Parents tend to be afraid of any contemporary lit, so I sent home a note explaining the book and my justifications for teaching it over Christmas break and asked them to contact me immediately if there were issues. Nothing. So in February, I start the unit. A week or so into it, I had a parent come and say that he thought the book was too violent for his sons (both of whom were in my classes). I said, ‘Ok, well, we just learned about the Holocaust, which was much more violent.’ And then he said, ‘Well, that’s ok because it really happened.’
Yes, reading about the mass murder of millions of people is just OK for the little angels, but an allegorical fictionalized account of a dozen or so killings is too much?
The funniest thing was that I saw one of his sons with the sequels during independent reading time later in the year. I hate parents.”