Monkey Musings from a Mother of Five: Pet Peeves

I just have to vent a moment...I'm to the point where incompetent teachers and other professionals blow my mind. Case in point....I have never been overly thrilled with Zane's pre-K, but it's the only one in town basically that had an opening and Florida provides voluntary (FREE-state funded) Pre-K at almost every center in town. Long story short, he was sent home with homework this week. He had a worksheet on the letter, "Y". He had missed quite a few of the items he had to circle, and his teachers asked me to have him complete the sheet again at home. Here's the kicker...Scrawled at the top of the page were these handwritten words from the teacher, "Re Dew at Home". ( Not kidding....!!!!)

Pair that with Bree's 1st grade teacher having a fondness for the following terms: "ya'll are being brats", "you need to get your head screwed on straight", "don't be a brat", and asking Jon and I to leave one day later, and come back early from a one week vacation because Bree just couldn't miss a Friday - it made it too difficult for the teacher and her spelling/unit test (that B. always gets a 100%) on. She also tells the students, "if you don't stop being a pain in my butt, I'm going to be calling your mother." Remember these are 6 year olds, not middle or high schoolers!

Since Bree is the "teacher's pet", she is one of the only ones that hasn't had these words directed at her, but even her little six year old mind recognized these phrases were inappropriate, and hurtful to her classmates. At a birthday party, I heard the same things from other parents, which corroborated Bree's story. I have always said I would back our teachers, and I will -providing they know how to spell when they are correcting MY son's spelling or work, and even I know that ridiculing and demeaning students is not effective in achieving learning. It demeans the student, provokes anger, reduces self-esteem, and promotes a defeatist attitude that does nothing to provide and alternative to the behavior that should have been highlighted to start with. Will I lose my temper as a teacher and say inappropriate things in the heat of the moment...probably, but this situation has continued throughout an entire school year and is not isolated. The principal was wonderful and agreed that this is a problem. If these comments had been directed at my sensitive daughter, she would have erupted in tears. But it's not okay for any student, regardless of their behavior or thick skin.

And just for a little icing on the cake, Bree has come home with three consecutive school pictures that are horribly off-center. How can photography be your job, and you can't even CENTER the picture? This one isn't the most horrible one, since there's some plants on the left, but the one prior to this was dreadful. She had a full inch of blue background on the left side, and her arm was touching the right edge of the photo. I actually wrote, "ARE YOU KIDDING ME" on the Proofs and sent them back to school. I just don't understand why you would take a job when you are not skilled enough to have it. And how you keep a job? With my luck, my first mistake would be put up on a billboard. I'm just amazed sometimes. For those of you wondering, I haven't said anything yet about Zane's paper, but I did phone the school principal regarding Bree's teacher's "inappropriate name calling and terminology".

Okay, that's my vent for the day. I meant to write this earlier, but it was on my mind today!