- To lie about why your child is absent - Press 1
- To make excuses for why your child did not do his work - Press 2
- To complain about what we do - Press 3
- To swear at staff members - Press 4
- To ask why you didn't get information that was already enclosed in your newsletter and several flyers mailed to you - Press 5
- If you want us to raise your child - Press 6
- If you want to reach out and touch, slap or hit someone - Press 7
- To request another teacher, for the third time this year - Press 8
- To complain about bus transportation - Press 9
- To complain about school lunches - Press 0
- If you realize this is the real world and your child must be accountable and responsible for his/her own behaviour, class work, homework and that it's not the teachers' fault for your child's lack of effort: Hang up and have a nice day!
- If you want this in another language, move to a country that speaks it.
Thank God for Hopkins! We must be in a time-bubble...our parents care (with few exceptions) and our students are a pretty decent lot!
As someone who is friends with several teachers here in Arizona, I find this to be absolutely hilarious. Most of the school districts here pander far too much to parents who think that their children can DO NO WRONG and that it's the instructor's fault that their child is skipping class, failing due to a lack of submitted assignments and attendance, and is behind on the course material because their kids don't bother to pay attention to anything but the backs of their eyelids when they *do* bother to grace the class with their physical (...but frequently not mental) presence.
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine (who teaches 10th grade Social Studies at a school in Maryvale), was telling me a horror story not too long ago about the sorts of crap that goes on in the district where she's employed. The staff gets pretty much zero support from the administration- if a parent complains, they get no back-up at all.
A lot of her students are failing due simply to the fact that they just don't bother to show up. She receives no completed assignments from these kids, and they don't bother to hand in tests when they're given. But it's all her fault all of a sudden because little Johnny or Jill's mother or father comes along and says their child is a brilliant student and the class must not be intellectually stimulating enough (or some other equally bullshit excuse, like "Well, Ms. So-And-So must have deliberately failed my child because they dislike him/her, because my child has done their assignments. They said they did and I believe them." Which is also a load of crap, because who in their right 'effing mind is going to trust a teenager with a penchant for excuse-making).
...And yes. She's gotten calls like this from administrators because parents called demanding that she be fired for daring to fail their 'pwecious darling'.
It's ridiculous. I remember dreading getting so much as a C on my report card... because I knew my parents were A.) going to grill my ass about why I was getting such a piss-poor grade in ANY class and B.) were going to have a nice long discussion with my teachers about why I was getting such a crap grade, just to make sure my story checked out and I wasn't pulling some stupid excuse from my ass or something.
Apparently Hopkins must be ass backward or something... but at least they're doing something right. We were actually held ACCOUNTABLE for our actions, and our work was OUR RESPONSIBILITY.
Too bad that's not the norm anymore.