by Curmie
I’ve promised two essays that are indeed partially written; I could finish one of them in 20 minutes or so if I could just concentrate, but something else always seems to come up. So let me try yet a different topic.
One of my friends and former students (we’ll call him L for the purposes of this post) teaches theatre in a public school. He recently posted on Facebook about a confrontation he’d had with the father of one of his students. The boy had failed to do three significant assignments, and, curiously enough, his grade reflected that fact.
Ah, but you see, the lad is an athlete, and a failing grade made him academically ineligible. So Dad screams for “about 15 minutes.” My friend responded like this: “I want him to be able to play […], too. I understand how important it is for him to have that outlet. But if I want lights on in my house, I gotta pay bills. If I wanna drive a car, I gotta pay to put gas in the car. So, if _______ wants to play […] then he’s gonna need to stop being lazy and do what is required in this class. Not to mention the other three classes he is failing.”
L got literally dozens of positive responses: “likes,” “loves,” and comments, including from me. Indeed, although he’d done some great work as an actor for me, and had subsequently had no little success in the professional world, I’ve never been prouder of him.
What he described, of course, is a familiar situation to anyone who has taught for even a short while. Some students—especially but by no means exclusively athletes—not only want, but expect, special treatment. Their parents do, too. Sometimes their coaches get into the act. I once had a “student-athlete” bring his position coach along to whine about his grade. The latter demanded that I change the grade of his star player. Yes, demanded. Not “asked if there was anything that could be done,” demanded. I told him to get out of my office, that I wouldn’t discuss grades with anyone but the student himself. He went stomping down to the department chair’s office while I told the student that there was no way I’d change his grade.
The student had a D on one hour-exam and failed the other two. He routinely failed the reading quizzes. He didn’t write either of the two required papers. He got something like a 21 (yes, out of 100) on the final exam. Plus, we had a departmental policy that no one with seven or more absences—including excused absences—would pass the course. I can’t remember exactly how many he had… eleven, maybe? Ah, but he seized on that: one of those absences should have been excused, you see. Note that the policy doesn’t differentiate between excused and unexcused absences, that he’d still be over the limit, and that with those other scores he’d have failed even with a perfect attendance record. Oh, and the reason he missed class on that one occasion was that he was in court, being convicted of a violent crime.
The good news in this scenario was that my department chair had my back. Yes, that should be expected, but it isn’t always the case, especially if we’re talking about a star athlete, or the kid of some influential politician or wealthy donor or whatever. I don’t know if they tried to bully the dean when neither my chair nor I would give in, but if they did, he sent them packing, too.
This being a rather perspicacious readership, I suspect you know where this is heading. I’ve been lucky enough to have spent virtually my entire career in places where I was trusted to do my job; my grading decisions were always final. But it is not always thus, as my former student discovered.
The school administration—as is too often the case, a perfect storm of cowardice (a.k.a. weeniedom), sloth, and stupidity—made my friend change the kid’s grade. Apparently, they exerted similar pressure on the other three teachers, as well, as the lad miraculously became eligible again. I’m not sure of the exact circumstances, and the Facebook post that reveals that sports (or maybe just parental bellicosity?) will always trump classwork at that particular school has been taken down. Maybe my friend capitulated to pressure; maybe the administrators just changed the grades themselves.
Anyway, I apparently saw the post in question only after it had been up for a while. I was about to tell my friend to get the hell out of that school, but then I looked at the other comments. At least a dozen other teachers, some of whom had also been my students, chimed in the they had endured similar situations at their schools, often several times. It didn’t matter where they taught, or what they taught, or how long they’d taught: same story. Students were not allowed to fail, no matter what they did…, or, more likely, didn’t do. And any attempt to apply any academic standards whatsoever must be quashed.
On the one hand, it was heartening to see my friend get support, or at least commiseration, from so many fellow travelers. On the other hand, it was chilling to see the ubiquity of the problem. It’s bad enough at the college level, where I taught. Certainly the fact that I doubted not merely the competence, but the integrity, of people up the food chain from me was a factor in my decision to retire when I did. It’s even worse in the secondary schools.
Still, the comment that most caught my eye wasn’t one of solidarity. I can’t quote it directly, but the substance was that since my friend can’t do anything about the current situation, he should just document it and move on, because one of his students might need similar… erm… “assistance” in the future: if the administration can change grades so X can play his sport, they can change grades so Y can be in the musical.
I can certainly understand that argument as a survival tactic. It is, in some ways, equitable, but it is also an option unavailable to someone who teaches history or biology. Plus, of course, it serves to legitimize an irresponsible, anti-intellectual, and unethical process. Still, it is a metaphorical arrow in L’s quiver, whether he would ever use it or not, and he would probably be wise to let the administration know it’s there. I’m enough of a Confucian to believe that every situation is different, and it’s not difficult to imagine a scenario in which such a strategy might be at least ethically neutral.
Ultimately, all I can do is to hope that L finds a responsible way to move forward. The professions (both theatre and teaching) need people like him. He’s a good man and apparently a good teacher, too. But I couldn’t blame him if he decided that quitting would be the only ethical choice.
Ethics Alarms 
Back in the late 1980s, I was brought in mid-year to a nearby high school as a substitute Spanish teacher. (Substitute certification only, since I had a non-teaching MA in Spanish.) I was the third Spanish teacher the students in Spanish 1 and Spanish 2 had had that year; the regular teacher had gone on maternity leave after 1st quarter, then an art teacher who didn’t really know Spanish had covered the class 2nd quarter. The students (and their parents, at the 3rd quarter parent-teacher conferences) complained that I took points off for spelling & punctuation errors (lack of tildes (~) and accent marks where needed, lack of upside-down question marks & exclamation marks at the beginning of questions & exclamations, etc.). The school administration backed me up on my grading, but insisted that I slow down the instructional pace and not attempt to finish each class’s textbook in the remaining half of the school year. None of my students flunked, but a fair number got Ds, and I know the students who completed Spanish 2 that year would not have met the foreign language requirement at colleges in my state, if a proficiency test was required in addition to just taking 2 years of high school Spanish.
It was frustrating, but it was also a situation where I didn’t have any control over where the students were at when I started with them, and there were limits on how much I could accomplish in half a year’s time.
(And since then? I tutored my own kids after school while they were growing up, and have been working as a legal secretary at my husband’s law firm for the past 16 years.)
The comments are correct. Across the country, the parents that get nationwide notoriety are the ones who question the age appropriateness of course matter or reference material. The larger problem of an overall abdication of parental responsibility that has been building over the last few decades gets little attention. Parents can and should go to bat for their children when there are genuine issues of teacher favoritism or bias that negatively affect the educational process; however, the little fiefdoms that many parents build in which their child is exempt from rules that they would demand be enforced for other people’s kids have been expanding and do far more harm than a parent who doesn’t want a 7-year old being told boys can be girls and girls can be boys.
There will always be bad teachers, just as there will always be bad bus drivers, bad waiters, bad lawyers, bad actors and bad mayors. Every occupation has a percentage of those who shouldn’t be doing that job. What I have found over the years, though, is that the best way to force out those who can do the job and have the work ethic needed for the job is to make them feel undervalued by allowing them to be subject to abuse and not backing them up when it comes to the essential component of the job.
A cashier is trained again and again not to refund X. A customer comes in and is advised of the policy, tries to get a refund anyway, verbally abuses the cashier, demands a manager and the manager refunds. There is no accountability on the part of the customer for how he treated the cashier who was following instructions and did not have the authority to refund and now a precedent has been set so that said customer knows he will get what he wants if he acts like a jerk. Yes, low salaries and poor benefits can be a motivating factor, too, but more and more people are deciding that the price of dignity is higher than any compensation they could get.
It’s no different with teachers. Teachers are there to educate. When bossy, influential or just pesky parents are allowed to abuse them with impunity and get what they want, even if its at the expense of a child’s education, there’s no reason to stay in the profession. Your former student was undermined by those above him and now the parent in question knows how to get what he wants and will behave accordingly the next time his boy fails to do the work.
That’s why cashiers quit. And it’s why teachers quit, too.
Yes, I see this in my company to at least some degree. An obnoxious client who, more often than not, is upset not with our work but with the outcome, makes a big fuss. Typically my manager and her boss, will try to get our side too and, if we haven’t screwed up will support our work. But if they move up the chain still being nasty, it has often happened that the higher ups will capitulate and order a refund.
The usual rationalization is that they are trying to retain the client (do we really think they’re coming back next year?), or trying to avoid a bad review.
The problem is (with this and other policies) is that it appears to us on the front lines, that upper management has not a clue as to how our offices really operate and how our business is performed. They have preconceptions about how it ‘ought’ to run, and try to make everyone conform to that, whether we are first year workers or have done the job for decades.
It’s a skilled job and there’s a shortage of workers. Those of us who know what we’re doing are repeatedly annoyed by many of these policies — and I’ll venture to say it contributes to experienced workers leaving the company that could be retained.
College sports, big time especially, is a serious problem that can be solved very easily. Simply stop pretending college athletes are students. Have teams but make the players employees of the college, like maintenance people. Don’t let them near a classroom. Everyone can cheer, cheer for old [insert college name here], and the college can make lots of television money and the fans and student body can take pride in their team beating other people’s teams, but the academic integrity of the place will have a chance to survive. Oh, and the college can get some dough from cell phone and online gambling!
It’s not just here in the United States. I taught ESL in China for a number of years and the same thing happened, only it was not for any academic reason, its just that everyone had to pass (at college level I might add).
I can remember my boss coming to me and asking me to proctor an oral exam for a student that wasn’t mine. Afterwards she drilled me on every point I gave him until his grade came up to passing. When I refused to give him higher than a 55, she left angrily and went to another teacher who she didn’t know I was close friends with. Apparently, they would do this until the student passed.
The next time it happened, I was given the questions to ask him/her. Strangely, never had a student fail after that.
My experience with my son.
Kindergarten: Everything was fine. He was reading like a fiend. He read through all the kindergarten books they had and was 1/2 way through the 1st grade books by the end of the year. His math was off the charts.
First Grade: The teacher didn’t like that my son was 1/2 way through the ‘standard’ set of books to read in reading, so she ‘slowed him down’. She refused to check his reading, so he wasn’t allowed to go on until the rest of the class caught up. He complained enough that she reassigned him to the lowest reading group, told him he was stupid, and wouldn’t let him read any more books for the year. All complaints were vain. So I moved schools because she was moving to third grade the next year and would be his teacher again.
Second Grade: The teacher left for an ‘education enrichment program’ for 3 months in the middle of the year. The classroom discipline went to pieces. My son said it was too loud for him to concentrate, so I sent him with OSHA earmuffs. The school told me that I couldn’t send them unless I provided enough for the entire class. He was being bullied by three students, but they blamed it on him and wrote him up 4 times. It turns out that they couldn’t punish the bullies because they had a racial quota on punishments. He was blamed for bullying the developmentally challenged child of another one of the third grade teachers and punished. They did not notify me of any of this until the end of the year. The next year, guess which teacher (of 4) he was assigned to? They refused to tell me his teacher until the 1st day of class and then told me his teacher-assigned student number was 666. I had to move schools again rather than subject my son to that torture.
Third Grade: Great teacher, everything was fine. This was a private school and the teacher had had no teacher education training at all. He was starting to like reading again.
Fourth Grade: He got the only state-certified teacher at the school. She made them read exclusively Roald Dahl books. My son hated them. The teacher gave him D’s for all assignments, as she did to all the boys. He had to make a diorama about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He spent a lot of time on it. I thought it looked pretty good. He got a D. I complained to the principal. The principal was impressed by his diorama and was shocked he got a D. The teacher told the principal that she was so ‘blown away’ by the girl’s dioramas and she didn’t actually get a chance to look at the ones by the boys, so she gave them all D’s. The teacher was fired at least, but it was mainly for the witchcraft she was teaching the girls.
Fifth Grade: The third grade teacher moved to 5th grade. Good year.
Sixth Grade: He starts getting bad grades in math. He loves math. The problem is that he isn’t showing his work. I look at the problems and talk to him. He isn’t showing work because the problems are easy enough that he is doing them all in his head without thinking about it. He can’t understand how these problems are more than 1 step. Example 3x-5 = 2. Answer x=7/3. I have him demonstrate for the teacher. She insists he has to show at least 3 steps to get credit. He raises his math grade to a C.
Seventh Grade: Different math teacher, same problem. Now, he is getting F’s on his exams despite getting all the answers right. Also, they tests are 50% vocabulary with made up word and terms just to give them something to memorize. Finally, the teacher tells me that he got a 0% on the exam because he did all the problems ‘wrong’ and she needs to break his spirit to make him comply. He did get the correct answer on all of them, but he solved them a different way. The now-state-certified math teacher told me ”There is only 1 way you can solve a math problem”.
I pulled him and had to homeschool him. I didn’t have time to homeschool him, but I couldn’t subject him to the professional torturers that is the teaching profession. So, he is getting by as well as he can. He isn’t learning even 1/2 of what he should and probably 1/4 of what he could. He did Geometry, Algebra II, baby physics, and biology freshman year. His sophomore year, he has done Trigonometry, chemistry and is now in statistics and biology again. The teachers made him hate learning and hate reading. It is like pulling teeth to make him learn anything. It is also hard because his friends still in school are calling him to tutor them and he is 2-3 years ahead of them and it difficult to convince him that he isn’t learning enough when he knows he is learning a lot more than the kids in school.
So, in 8 years, there were only 2 good teachers. State-certified teachers were the worst. I see the damage done to the students by the schools every day. One year, I had 3 students from the local school system who had been in ‘remedial’ classes their entire time. They were very bright, but had been told they were stupid. It was shocking, they picked up material very quickly once I convinced them that they weren’t stupid. One went to med school, one to pharmacy school, and last I hear, one works for the State Department as a diplomat (2 out of 3 isn’t bad). The teachers created this mess, and they have damaged untold numbers of children and ruined untold lives in the process. So, I don’t want to hear any complaints from the teachers. Live in the hellhole you created and don’t complain to me that education ‘only’ pays more than any other humanities field and has better benefits than most mid-level executives.
This week, I found out one of the middle school teachers in town has been watching porn on his phone in class with the volume on for the last few years. Parent complaints to the principal and school board were ignored. Only news media attention led to any action. Last year, one of the coaches was convicted for raping a bunch of male students over the last 10 years and the paperwork showed the principal, superintendent, and the local police covered it up. It took a parent taking her child’s case above the city police to get that addressed, but the DA tried to throw the case. The superintendent and principal hugged him in court after he was sentenced. The schools have been writing legal tickets for kids who act up in class. When they go to court, they are appointed an attorney. That attorney was molesting the boys. Complaints to the police, school, and judges were ignored. A parent had to plant a device in her child’s pants to record as he was being raped and send it to the media to get that addressed. At least I avoided all that with my son. So, yeah, no sympathy.
I had twin sons: one was autistic; the other was a late talker, but perfectly fine and ready for regular classes (plus speech therapy for articulation) by the time he was old enough for kindergarten. (The school district would have loved to put both boys in special-ed preschool classes, though.) My husband and I tutored both boys in reading, and essentially taught both of them to read. The neurotypical son would probably have learned to read in the regular school classes, but not as far above grade level as he was with our tutoring. The autistic son might never have learned to read without our tutoring, as the school district wasn’t trying very hard at all, and what they did try was usually well below the level he had already reached at home. Year after year, we would have to bring a book our autistic son had been reading at home to his IEP meetings, have the lad brought into the meeting, and demonstrate that our son could indeed read, because district staff couldn’t believe that he was literate. We took him up through 6th grade level in basal readers, and then found lots of the Step into Reading series (almost all Level 4, the most difficult level) and the old Landmark books for him to enjoy.Sincerely,Catherine McClarey
A lot of people (especially liberals) like to point out how untrustworthy churches have become with what they have done to kids. Those that have done those awful things deserve all the harsh treatment they get but some of the same people who cry fowl paint Public Education as some sacred thing when their problems are significantly worse.
I find this bizarre, and it’s maybe because I don’t have kids, so I’ve been divorced from academia for a very long time. I’m also thinking there might be a brush of Americanism in play here.
See, when I was growing up, I was a “good” student, I had great grades, but I was just as no-nonsense then as I am now, often to my detriment. Perhaps even more so, because I feel like in my wisdom, I pick my battles better than I used to. I vividly remember a confrontation between myself and my 7th grade social studies teacher. She was very pregnant, and I think having a rough time, and just screaming at one of my classmates for not bringing his textbook to class. I stood up and yelled at her, “Lay off him, you bitch”. I was sent to the principal’s office, my mother was called in, and the principal asked me if I’d called Ms. J a bitch, and I said, “Yes, but you have to see her in action Mrs. D, she’s a massive bitch right now.” My mother was horrified, the principal made the mistake of smiling. I like to think that she knew I was right, but she couldn’t let someone get away with calling a teacher a bitch, so I was given a level one suspension, and by the time I came back, Ms. J was on mat leave, and I sailed through class like I always did.
That’s mostly irrelevant, just a bit of background that I like to wax on every now and again. I guess my point in a humblebragging, very roundabout way is that my grades were always good and I’ve always been an asshole.
But grades don’t matter unless you’re failing or going into high tier post secondary (And I understand the former was in play for the example given in the post). More often than not, no one cares about the letter so long as you pass. I was a straight A student. I was accepted into the University of Manitoba right beside the mouth-breathing morons that barely eked out a D. Once you’re in post secondary, your grades *really* don’t matter, so long as you pass. I’ve never, to this date, been asked for or have received a university transcript with a CV.
So while I understand the pushback from families of kids with failing grades (to a very limited extent, because while they’re wrong to do so, at least it’s not entirely pointless), what truly blows my mind are the helicopter wine moms trying to Karen their kids from a B to an A… It feels like entirely wasted effort… Particularly in America, where so much emphasis is put on the SAT scores, which teachers don’t have input to. From the position of an outsider looking in: It’s like more attention is being spent on these metrics in America, despite the metrics mattering even less than they do in Canada (we don’t have SATs).
Am I missing something?
Well, the SAT comes into and out of style. A couple of the top schools are now dropping it as an admissions requirement. A couple others that had dropped it in years past are requiring it again.
You’re right, though, HT, that unless you’re in danger of failing (or being ineligible for extra-curriculars, or whatever), or you’re looking to go to a good college or grad school, there’s no real difference between grades. (Even less so in grad school, although anything below a B there is probably a red flag to a prospective employer who knows how to read a transcript.) One of my favorite graduation cards shows a cartoon character launched out of bed, eyes bulging, screaming, hair straight out, as his alarm clock goes off. On the front of the card, it says something like, “Life’s little wake-up calls, #17.” Inside the card it reads, “No one gives a shit what your GPA was.”
The other thing I find interesting is that in my experience, at least, the folks who complain about grades are almost always the ones who have no case. Inevitably, there will be a few students every semester who are very close to the border between two grades. Some get the better grade; some don’t. I taught long enough that there were probably 100 students who didn’t get the benefit of the doubt in those situations. In one case, it was the only B an otherwise straight-A student received in her college career.
Not one of those students challenged their grade. Those who did were seldom even close to getting the higher grade. Early in my career I taught a fall-semester course in which one of the students fancied himself a potential law school student, so he’d do anything he could to improve his GPA (except actually do the work required by the class, of course). I was sitting in my office in January, reading something to prepare for class. This young man burst into the room without knocking and screamed “Why did I get a C in your class?” I looked up, kind of growled “Because I was in a good mood,” and went back to my reading. I think that might have given me something of a reputation…