I am working with a teacher who is unfortunately in one of those “dramas” this week that we sometimes get into with parents when we try to teach according to the standard. I thought I would share some of my communication with him here:
He wrote to me:
Ben –
I received a parent email today about a referral I wrote for their child, and they wish to meet with me and an administrator asap. As it turns out, they work at this school and have a lot of experience as a teacher, as a curriculum coordinator, as a beginning teacher coordinator, etc. Additionally, they have a fair amount of power in the school, akin to an admin position. Their child is one of those children who is very bright but obstinate and tries to get away with doing the least amount possible and always looking like they have a chip on their shoulder. They think they are exempt from ‘playing the game’. They are also at the heart of the group of boys in my other classes to commit so many micro acts of disrespect and inappropriate behaviors and comments, but they themselves always seem elusive and to dance around the boundaries, not quite hitting it head on for me to write up.
Well, the other day, they enjoyed their snack in the hallway during class-time for 20 minutes on their phone, so I wrote them up. I haven’t written them up all year long, and that was so blatant an offense of cutting class that this time I did. I know this meeting is going to be very difficult for me, and I feel sick every second that I think about it. Other than the grading rubric and the standard of communication, how would you recommend I prepare?
My response:
We all have to endure this insanity. I’ve been there and you want to vomit until the meeting is over. I’ve been to Vomit Town. It’s part of the job.
What you have to do is realize that this is a very deep problem in the family that is not your problem. What is going on is that the kid is resisting the parents because they want him to become who they are: talented, smart, in control at the administrative level, but fake. He resists that influence in order to become himself. Jung calls it the process of individuation. He is a hero is some ways because he won’t be broken.
Do you see the psychology at work here? His parents’ power-tripping is astoundingly detrimental to the kid and he will probably – just in order to find out who he is himself – have to resist them until he gets old enough to run away from them at full speed. He will have problems. But none of that is your problem.
You have a simple situation here where the kid skipped class and so you wrote a referral. Why prepare any more than that for such a meeting? Just tell them that he skipped class and that you wrote him up for it.
Now it may be that at that point in this little drama, once you say that simple sentence above at the beginning of the meeting, they will then try to turn the discussion around and try to make it about you and how you grade.
Again, keep it simple and thus deflect their efforts. Just tell them how you grade: 50% according to the Communication Standard of the American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages, ACTFL, your parent organization, and 50% formative quizzes because the research indicates that formative assessment is the best way to assess in language classes. That’s all you have to say about how you grade your students.
You can offer to show them more information about the way you grade but don’t talk about it in that meeting. You can provide them from research in the form of my books, blog posts, articles, etc. or anywhere else. We have a mountain of information if you need it. I am very used to having to defend myself in this way against ignorant parent/admins or in this odd case a combination of both.
I am attaching “4 Parent Letters” from my new middle school book. They can and do shut these kinds of people up. You may want to cut and paste into an email response some of that material and it may even shut them up so much that they don’t even want a meeting.
This is an age where teachers are not respected and thus you are not alone. I also have been through events like this with parents that seemed like at the time my heart was being torn out and they were trying to “out” me as incompetent. Looking back, I realized how incompetent their attacks on me really were. Insert discussion about the Velveteen Rabbit here.
But this is an age of bullying and they are setting up to bully you, but they are wrong and you are right and if you have an administrator with half a brain she will defend you and all will be fine. This trial will build a stronger bond with your admin team.
I withstood the attacks over all those years and learned a lot about myself in the process. You are a good teacher and you know what you are doing. These parents, bless their hearts, do NOT know what they are doing.
So keep this whole thing simple. That is my main point here. It is the key to everything. I talk about the “Broken Record” technique below. Use it. Do not get into arguing. Keep your Mr. Rogers smile on. These are narcs and so you will get more practice on that front, which anyone who has ever been an empath victim of a narc must do – grow internally even though it hurts, resist and keep distance.
Tell them that you wrote the kid up for skipping half of class because it’s part of your job. Don’t allow them to make you a part of their drama with their child, because you are not part of it.
If you have to tell them how you grade – keep it no more complex than the words I used above. Then offer to get them more to read about how you teach and grade if they want it. But they probably won’t request same because their problems are far more complex with that kid than even they realize and again you have nothing to do with that.
You see, they don’t really want to know about you and how you teach at all, they only want someone to scapegoat to blame for their bad parenting. If they can’t find a weak scapegoat who will cave in, then they will be forced to deal with what they are doing to that poor kid, and they probably aren’t up to it, so they need to try to break you in the only milieu that they feel any power in – the school.
But you won’t be broken, not now or in any future moments of your career, because you will keep things so simple, as per the three points below, which is what you will be drawing from in your conversation with them.
Sadly, they’ll lose the kid eventually – he will bolt for the open spaces on a full sprint – but again that is not your problem. Just don’t let them make you into a scapegoat.
The Broken Record technique is when you don’t go past a certain level of explanation to people who think you owe them more as they try to trip you up and put the blame on you for their kid not coming to class on time. This you cannot let happen. You must repeat like a broken record, “He skipped half of class so I wrote him up.” Say it 50 times if you have to until they get it and don’t get any deeper into it. The kid skipped class and you wrote him up. It has nothing to do with how you teach.
Dive in to the attachment and let me know if you need more help on this. You are in the right and they are in the wrong. If you do this well, if you refuse to accept the narcissist attack on you as an empath, it may do them a big favor of driving their family into therapy, which is what they most need instead of trying to blame someone outside the family system, which is cowardice.
If you cave and fail to be like a broken record by admitting you may have done something wrong, it will hurt you and hurt them because this is really about getting that family into therapy, and that won’t happen if you accept the blame. So just hit the three points listed below in the simplest way possible and without going deep into it. There isn’t much to explain here anyway, right?
And if they do want to go deeper, do not do that in that meeting. Offer to provide them with more information later. I have all sorts of curricular defense articles so that you will win, and along with it you will gain the respect of your admins, who usually hate parents like this but have to act like they are interested in this kind of trash but really support you and would like to tell parents like this to just piss off.
So stay simple and give them only these shallow answers:
1. He skipped class.
2. I grade in alignment with ACTFL, the Standard and the research.
3. If you want more information on point 2 above, I will provide it. (I can give them thousands of pages – you’re covered.)