I was going to piggy-back on the currently active thread about a teacher picking on a pupil, but it seemed after reading a few pages that the advice might be different so here goes:
DD (7) feels she is being unfairly targeted by her teacher for minor misdemeanours. She is one of a small number of pupils she claims the teacher 'doesn't like' and singles out for punishment. Another parent in the class has independently told me that her child has told her the same thing, her child is not one of the ones targeted but told her parents that my child was. I know another parent who made a similar complaint last year about the same teacher and a complaint to the head has already been dealt with this year about her treatment of the whole class (from another parent, nothing to do with me).
I have tried to do what I can at home to reinforce good behaviour for DD (both carrot and stick approaches) and have discussed with her several times that if she doesn't do anything wrong, she can't be punished, so to try to keep her nose clean and not step out of line. I have also told her that I'm monitoring all the punishments she gets so that I can decide for myself whether it is unfair or not.
I don't want to claim that she's a perfect child and never puts a foot wrong, but she has not in the past been any worse than any other child of her age and yet is now receiving the brunt of the sanctions. Last year, for example, she got an official sanction once in the year (and I thought her teacher was quite decent and strict last year, definitely not a push over), this year she has already had four since September. I have no problem with her being sanctioned if she has genuinely misbehaved, but I want it to be in line with the punishments others in the class receive, not singling her out.
As an example, another child in the class told the teacher in front of the whole class that she was wrong about a fact (which she was and genuinely didn't know it) and got no punishment. My daughter (on a different day) told the teacher that she had missed out a step in the document she was explaining (which she had) and was shouted at not to interrupt and called rude and was put on warning for a sanction.
The only thing I can get from the teacher, who has complained to me about dd's behaviour, is that she questions adults and children. The teacher labelled this as 'rude' 'completely unacceptable', 'insolent', 'would not be tolerated' etc. but I wasn't able to judge whether she has genuinely been insolent or not since I wasn't given any specific examples. I asked dd herself to give me examples and one of them sounded fair enough (as in, I would have considered it rude): she questioned why the teacher was giving out merits for a very easy task, but all the others just sounded like she had been asking a real question about the work e.g. did she have to write in full sentences on a comprehension test?
She has lost her lunchbreak twice to re-do work because it didn't fulfil the rubric (leave a line between statements). On one occasion she had 4 pages torn out of her book by the teacher and had to re-write them. Not because the work was wrong but because she hadn't followed the instructions about where to leave lines. Again, I didn't undermine the teacher on this, just told dd that she should listen more carefully in the future, but it did seem petty.
She has been moved to sit at the front of the classroom next to the teacher for an indefinite period (presumably until someone else does something worse), lost her break and received a sanction for pushing another child's cardigan off her chair. Again, I'm not saying it was appropriate behaviour, but it does seem to have been unnecessarily harshly dealt with.
DD is getting very despondent and defensive, to the stage where she wants to give up trying to do right because she's going to get shouted at anyway. She has been in tears begging me to move her school or home school her. She has been almost completely put off school and I worry that she's on the verge of refusing.
So, finally getting to the point: AIBU to take some action or is dd really just out of line? If I do something, then what? Complain directly to the teacher or higher up? If IABU then how do I sort dd out? I appreciate that her behaviour at the moment is sometimes rude (e.g. the question about merits) but the friction with the teacher is only going to make it worse, not better, so I'll need some way to correct her myself.
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AIBU?
Another teacher complaint one
98 replies
Fink · 18/10/2017 14:40
OP posts:
2ndSopranos ·
18/10/2017 16:20
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Message withdrawn at poster's request.
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