The parent was irate.
Rather than allow my Special Education students to depend on the giant, clumsy, plastic, spring-loaded, just above toy calculators that the department used because I knew there would be times they needed to do multiplication and there was no form of calculator around, or the batteries on the one they had died, I had the class memorize the times tables as best they could. I had learned mine up to the Tens by the third grade, and, even with the learning disabilities each kid had, none had the intelligence ceiling below a third grader so could learn as I had.
Not all kids could learn all the tables, but all, save one, learned considerably more than they had when they knew none of them. The complaint of the irate parent was that I was forcing the Times Tables on his son, and as he had had what he considered a successful life without them, his kid should not have to learn them either. It was demanded that I allow his son to use the toy calculators instead
And so it remained with his kid sitting in the classroom using his Fisher-Price styled calculator, which, for comparison of size, consider that between the universal remotes of decades past to those now, and his use of the calculator single him out. Overtime, he learned his Times Tables, all of them, because of peer pressure.
When heading into a week’s break I advised the students to use the time to occasionally look at and study the Tables but was informed they would be too busy to do any school work, I handed each kid three copies so they could tape one inside the refrigerator door as opposed on the door as no one stares at the door until they decide to open it, while most people open it and then stare inside the fridge, one on top of the toilet tank, and the last opposite the toilet at eye level on the opposite wall because they were guaranteed to be in the bathroom once or twice each day, and depending on the reason for their being there could study while either standing or sitting without the danger of misplacing the Ties Table papers.
A parent complained that I not only made a connection between the Times Tables and the bathroom, but in doing so I had used the word “toilet”. Her demand was that she be allowed to put them where she chose, something she could have done without my knowledge by just doing it, or her child should not be required to even attempt the learn them as if that threat would somehow harm me and not her child. An “issue” had to be made.
That student did learn the Time Tables but a little slower than most others who actually told stories of how visiting relatives laughed about the Table in the bathroom with some having been quizzed on them by the person after the flush and return to the visiting.
Since I began teaching, it was obvious that it would be good to have a picture or a model or replica if not the actual item when explaining things to the class whose learning would be enhanced by showing what eventually became known as “Realia”.
I had the usual facsimiles of historic documents, things like a bullet from Gettysburg to explain how a soldier in “Red Badge of Courage” could have his arm practically blown off by the size of it, something that impressed a student that had been involved in a drive-by and was glad they did not use old bullets, models ships which, along with a life-sized replica Lewis Templeton harpoon, were useful in making Moby Dick more understandable for my landlocked, Heartland students, and other historical and not so historical things that I could grab when needed and if needed to show the students.
There were also things more for decoration and ambiance that were based on things literary.
Among the things, Excuse me, Realia in my room was a poster of the Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey hanging in my room as one of those things that, although I may never use in class, was there for the students to discover. Gashleycrumb Tinies is a cautionary tale where children meet bad ends because they did not think before acting and the consequences were negative. Boris could not be eaten by bears unless he went where they were and Pru would not have been crushed in the brawl if she had not decided to enter the bar room.
A parent, however, who had never been in my class even on Parent/Teacher nights and who, therefore, had never seen the poster, saying nothing to me went straight to the powers that be, demanding my pro-abortion propaganda be removed from my room. After school the day of the complaint, the principal went to me classroom, not to remove but to inspect the poster, but couldn’t find anything in the room dealing with abortion, however, and upon seeing the poster did recall reading the Tinies when she was young, not knowing that as the offending poster.
As usually happens, and which did on another occasion, the move to remove the pro-abortion poster was joined by the parent’s friends and her pastor and his congregation. To end the problem, the principal agreed with me that by dividing the poster and hanging one side on one wall the other on another, and the complete, erroneously represented poster had been removed. After allowing the parent and her allies to walk through the room for their approval,they all gave it because the offending poster was non longer in the room, the offending poster none had seen before, during, and after,they demanded it be removed, and to them not seeing a large poster promoting abortion, it had been.
As we were working on more inclusive protective language in the school district’s student policies, some objected because we wanted Gay kids included as we headed to the new millenium. There were the usual baseless objections, but the committee working on this whole revision of the Student/Parent Handbook had everything on draft ready for school board vote, but were assured that we could proceed with the spirit of the changes as it was just a matter of accepting them, and the reasons for the additional inclusion had been made clear in statistics, studies, and reports. For this reason I felt comfortable putting up the list of famous Gay, Lesbian,
Bisexual, and Transgender people throughout history in my high school classroom I had hung for Gay History Month at the previous middle school at which I taught school with no comment and no further references to it, leaving it to be found by the students without any direction from me.
A parent, and eventually a Baptist pastors demanded this display of Homosexuality be removed.
In their demands they wanted all books in my classroom that might have Gay themes, any pictures, be removed with the big target being the huge chain in Rainbow colors I hung across my room. Although no books were removed even as they had all been gone through as the book shelf behind my desk with my personal reading and and other personal items like a coffee cup, had been rifled through and left to look like a post police raid scene from a movie.
The raid took place at night when I was home, and I had to be contacted by the vandals, the principal, the assistant principal, and the dean of education, because they wanted to know where I was hiding the big chain. I refused any cooperation especially as the big chain that was suspended across the room was a mall, Pride colored tennis bracelet I had bought in Dallas and which I had removed and placed on my desk one day, never to put it on again, as it kept getting caught on things and was annoying for that. It was the size big though to fit snugly on my wrist and obviously not all that big if they couldn’t find it. It sat on my desk the remainder of that year.
They could not find the poster showing people having sex that the parent had claimed the poster was illustrating and wanted me to come to school late at night, to show them where I had hidden it, another impossibility as the existence of the poster ws the invention of the parent.
I had listed the names of famous people and he imagined people having sex. Yet, his delusion and, perhaps, lewd mind was respected and addressed rather than his being told to go away.
His solution was to have his daughter transferred to another high school which would turn her away because the staff did not want to deal with any theatrics this parent might choose to display making it necessary to enroll her in a costly private school where, as it was to turn out, he continued to attempt micromanaging that school to promote his own personal, political, and religious beliefs.
Rainbows and anything Gay were not allowed in my classroom which I pointed out caused a huge problem as I was a Gay teacher on contract and would have to be in that room.
Yet another reasonable parental complaint.
Because I would be grading essays at home at night, and so as not to deal with ever fading pencils or sentences smudged to make them illegible from a sweaty arm during the writing, and because following a simple direction to use blue or black ink as opposed pencil or any other preferred color could decide if a job application was read, and because a lot of red on an assignment does not look good and is hard to correct, I required all assignments be in blue or black ink reserving pencils for math class.
This brought about a parental complaint, again to the office and not to me, that my having requirements in my classroom, some of which some kids might not like, such as the blue/black ink requirement with which her son did not approve would be setting up a power struggle in my classroom with her son that would interfere with his education, so, therefore I should allow him to use whatever his chosen writing utrensil was regardless of color.
I tried to explain there was no power struggle as I was the teacher and set the rules in my class to get the maximum student achievement, and the best way to avoid such an anticipated power struggle was to inform her kid he needed to have blue and black pens for class.
His next assignment was passed in in pencil.The following day I handed his ungraded paper pack and informed him he could pass it in the following day in blue or black ink. The mother was at school shortly after dismissal to complain about my unreasonable requirement, demanding I be made to accept her son’s work no matter what medium it was written in. I explained I had gotten to his paper late in my essay correcting and my eyes were too tired to read his essay and being in ink would make sure this would not happen again. I refused to go along with her suggestion that when he wrote in pencil I correct his essay first, because that requirement would set up a power struggle between the three of us.
He was habitually borrowing pens from other students.
I was teaching a History class when we came to World War II. It would seem to be extremely difficult to teach about the war if you omitted Hitler and the Nazis, but because in explaining what led up to the war I had to explain what Hitler and the Nazis supported and promoted, a parent, again saying nothing to me, went to the administrators and lodged the complaint that I was trying to get her child to abandon Christ and follow Hitler.
Needless to say the unit on World War II was a little weak as, while the issue was being discussed, just telling students we won a war against the bad guys without context made it necessary to go back over the material when it was decided the best solution was to have that student placed in another history class where the parent was to later complain about the teacher mentioning the KKK.
I was in trouble because I mentioned Walt Whitman was Gay and was informed that was a fact no student needed to know, while on the contrary they all do, especially those for whom he could be a meaningful figure and source of self-esteem.
In my Classroom, at least, Walt was Gay.
Because I was openly Gay, the attempt was made to require me to show the principal any book I brought on campus for personal reading as some child might come upon my book and commit the most heinous of crimes, begin reading it. The content was to be cleared as “not Homosexual.” I never complied with this ridiculous rule and this lack of abiding with a directive was brought up occasionally as the reason I was not a good teacher anymore.
I have had to deal with demonstrably uninformed parents, pastors and their congregations, and politicians who tasted a monster they could use to promote that whole Christian Nation thing which would seem to be in competition with God’s claim of having a Kingdom of His own and emphasizing that, “My kingdom is not of this world”, because, rather than do the work and possibly learn their perception was wrong, they lump things into extremely broad categories of their own making and simply condemn not on the content of a book or idea, but on its having been lumped in with other unrelated books in their contrived category.
An attempt was made to prevent me from mentioning that Walt Whitman was Gay because of the trope that Gay means sex-act, and claiming that by mentioning he was Gay I was bringing up sex and that was not in my curriculum. I stopped teaching Robert Browning and his lovely wife, Elizabeth Barrett, because they were always writing those pornographic love poems. I assumed that, had I brought them up, the students might head to the nearest porn palace to find out all the ways he loved her.
Percy Shelley and Mary were not such a problem as he wrote romantic poetry and she wrote books about reanimation and monsters so the sex could not have been all that good or even of any interest to students who stereotyped things a lot.
We are required to teach Romeo and Juliet who as children in adolescence fall in love, and eventually kill themselves because the parents did not want them to date, something that could have been prevented if they had paid attention to the man at the beginning of the play who made it quite clear their love was “star crossed”. We have two tweens killing themselves, and a few others along the way, to deal with their decision and its consequences.
But mention Walt Whitman was Gay and the parents are traumatized.
I taught down the hall from a History teacher who had recently accepted Jesus and went into proselytizing about Jesus like a smoke quitter who becomes as annoying about everyone’s need to quit as a vegan when you order a cheeseburger.
In his history class he found ways to introduce the Bible into any event and went full bore when covering a war or battle and he could read an account of some Biblical event in an attempt to draw parallels. I was expected to avoid an important part of a writer’s persona and possibly their motivation for writing the great works, but Walt’s love was unacceptable while the kids got the thrill of all God’s Old Testament smiting, complete with foreskin removal and collection and the inevitable post battle rampage in God’s name. Amen
On parent teachers’ nights for 38 years at four each year, the parents who came in were those who really only came in to have their parental approach to education validated as they were the ones whose kids were doing well and achieved academically. The parents who should have but never showed up were those whose children reflected their bad attitude toward education. The no shows, although usually claiming a schedule conflict and an inability to reschedule a private conference, where the ones quickest to drop everything and get to the school or, more often, central administration to lodge a complaint whose resolution was to have their child not learn something because, as they did not know it themselves and either did not see the value of their child learning more for a better life, a thing most parents want, or to prevent their child learning more so parental deficiencies, real or internally perceived, would not be seen.
As a Kid, if I asked either of my parents for help with something with which they were not familiar, they would not pretend universal knowledge but would acknowledge this was something they didn’t know about and would suggest someone who might. Their reaction was not to demand the subject matter not be taught because they did not know it, but that we learn it in spite of their not having done that. There were many post World War II things we were learning in school that were not around in their day.
Jaws, the novel and movie, came out while I was teaching College Prep American Literature at the same time I was covering Moby Dick in class, and some students saw some parallels with Moby Dick and Jaws that gave them the impression that Jaws was just an updated version of the classic and asked if they could do a group report on this. A few students subsequently handed in a written report showing their findings. The principal thought it a good assignment as it was a) connected to literature, b) had the kids voluntarily reading a novel, c) employed thinking skills, d) required coordinating disparate research for inclusion in one report, and e) was student initiated.
A higher up in the religious order that ran the school demanded I be fired for allowing such an assignment as he had spent a whole night underlining all the curse words in the book to which the students were exposed by it.
The principal shot him down by asking for a plot summation which the priest could not offer as he had not read the book, but had merely skimmed it, looking for curse words. The question, therefore, became, which should be properly dealt with and punished, the teacher whose students had read two novels and produced a well written, well thought out comparison on two books, one they read voluntarily as it was outside the curriculum, or an old man sitting alone in his room at night going through a book, not reading it, but going through it and only to underline the dirty words he found.
When parents complain individually or in a public forum, there are certain questions they must be able to answer before even pretend attention will be give.
If it is a book,
1) Did you read it?,
2) Can you summarize the plot?,
3) Can you cite the specific passages with which you find fault and explain why?,
and
4) Would you accept a parent’s objections to books that you have no problem with.
Although it would be rather mean, if I were to be the interviewer and asked the fourth question, I would request an example of a book the parent believed should never be banned and fill out the complaint form myself to have it banned as the parent waited patiently for me to finish. My reasons would be as broad and irrelevant as the ones on the parental complaint as I would merely be copying them and reapplying them to other books as is the accepted practice.
If it is a classroom presentation, rather than a general, blanket complaint, I would ask,
1) What specific information do you object to and why?
and
2) Can you supply the correct information for our review to help the teacher improve for our review?
If any parent accepts that their child when telling a story about school does so completely factual and precisely without artifice, they forget their own childhood. If a student says that a teacher said something, the adult thing to do is make sure the teacher did and not go to school administrators to file an official complaint based on a story about a piece of information stated during class by a person with one or more degrees in their subject matter and follow up refresher classes in a six hour day with constantly changing circumstance and multiple personal and circumstance based interactions with other kids and their stories, and a thousand other distractions that could influence the details details of a post school day story.
Nothing against parents, I had two good ones. The problem is that too often the least common denominator, often because of their lack of education attempts to control the education of everyone and find those who will support them, not because of the validity of the complaint, but how it can be used to control the education of those who appreciate the value of a good one.
The assumption upon which each book, each bit of factual information is challenged should not have that challenge presented without required rationale for the request and this must be more than a political statement or slogan.
If it is because it is “woke’, that term must be defined by the complainant and how what is objected to supports the concept of woke must be presented.
You do not believe your kids merely because they said so.
Adults should not be denying information to students for that reason.
They are the adults.
Perhaps the best response to book banning and controlling education based on the because-I-said-so approach should be,
“No. Make me.”
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