Sometimes parents just don't know how to get of the way and let their kids be their own people.
717 Times. Let That Sink In
“I currently have a 6th grade student whose step-mother emails me on a daily basis. Good kid- A in my class, no behavior problems, but yet I’ve had 94 emails from her this year (last I checked). Typically they are completely unnecessary and I just want to ask her, “DO YOU EVER TALK TO YOUR SON?!” He could clearly answer 95% of her questions! Yet, she still sends me emails asking things like, “What was the situation that caused M to be marked tardy to your class?” and “There is an assignment in the gradebook marked with a 0/0. It’s titled Extra Credit Bonus Points. Please advise on how this will affect his grade.”
Just to show you how bananas this woman is, I’ve screen-shot part of her kids’ school profile. It shows that, since August, she has checked his grades 717 times. Holy hell. Your kid is 12, cut the cord and teach him personal responsibility.”
I’ll Do It Myself!
“I have a student’s mother who emails me about once a week to try and scavenge extra information about what “her son” should write for his assignment. She’s got the criteria sheet and the reading list, yet she’s still never gotten above a ‘B-‘.
Because she’s actually quite a crappy writer, it’s nearly impossible to prove that it’s her writing his assignments without one of them admitting it. But the whole staffroom knows the truth.”
Spoon Fed
“During my student teaching I had a student who’s mother was the definition helicopter parent. He was supposedly “gifted” so she made sure to inform us we were wrong in our grading if he received anything less than an A.
She would come in every morning and unpack his backpack for him. If she was there for lunch, she would spoon feed him.
This was a 3rd grader.”
A REAL Helicopter Parent
“This one time we asked a child’s father, who was (and probably still is) a high ranking DEA agent, to give a speech to the students, and he showed up in a helicopter.
I’m not a teacher, but that did actually happen when I was in school. The helicopter entrance was meant to get us excited, and it really did. Helicopters are awesome.”
Stage Helicopter
“I teach middle school English at a public school in Texas. I brought a mom in several months ago to discuss how her son had been plagiarizing (poorly, I might add). But she only wanted to talk about his acting career. She pulled out a leather bound portfolio stuffed with acting/modeling photos of her little angel and talked at me for an hour about each one. Cut to this week. He turns in a paper about his strongest childhood memory. It’s a two page summary of every famous person he’s acted with and what movies I would know them from now. Looking at the writing style and level of detail, the mom CLEARLY wrote the essay. Wtf.”
Call Me Back!
“I’m not a teacher, but I work in Student Affairs at a college, and we had a parent who called the president of the college because her daughter had not called her back in 12 hours.
The student had gone out with friends the night before and forgotten her cell phone, so her mom called the school in a panic the next morning wanting us to track down her daughter. Who’s in college.”
Good Grades If It Kills Him
“We pulled a child who was allergic to eggs out of a lab in which egg shells were broken down by vinegar, then the eggs were placed in hypotonic / hypertonic solutions to illustrate cell membrane action. The parent flipped a shit that his child missed two lab periods – although we’d prepared handouts, gone over the relevant info with the kid, and sent him along to the library so he wouldn’t die of anaphylactic shock. Geez, we’re trying to save your kid’s life, here. Two lab periods in the seventh grade won’t make a big diff.”
Definitely Legit
“I had a student a few years ago whose mom would email all his teachers every single day wanting to know what we had done in class (we have websites with class calendars on them). It got so bad that the school eventually told her that she could only email once a week.
Later that year, the student turned in a research paper, and the first paragraph had been stolen word for word from a website. I printed out the web page, gave the kid a zero, and wrote a referral for cheating.
Hours later, the mom emails me furious that I would accuse her son of cheating. I explained the situation, and she told me “oh, it wasn’t his fault! He had been too busy to type it, so I did it for him. I wanted to spruce up the intro a little bit, so I added that little extra bit. I guess I forgot to add the source”
Seems legit…”
With Parents Like These…
“My mom used to read over my papers and say that they were “utter s—,” that they read “like a retarded person wrote them.” Sometimes, she’d do this while hitting me. She’d then sit down and slowly write out an essay that I was supposed to turn in, all the while telling me how much of a disappointment I was. When I turned it in, it wold be obvious that she wrote it. She was a lawyer, so everything that she wrote sounded cold, detached, and very, very legal. Her version never followed the prompt. She’d get lost in the formatting (noteworthy in that the formatting that she used was not the one that we learned in class). I’d usually get a C or D when I turned in her versions. One teacher even wrote “Don’t get your parent to write this crap!” right next to a big red D. She’d then beat me and said that I was a fucking retard for getting such a low grade. Whenever I managed to write a paper without her interference, I’d usually get a B or an A. Teachers would compliment me on my writing. She never did, though. Not once.
She did the same thing when I was typing my Eagle Scout report. No matter what I wrote, it would be shit. I even copied a similar project’s report word for word, just replacing a few words where needed. Apparently that was shit too. This was a report that was basically already passed by the council, but it wasn’t good enough for her. I remember crying a lot. Eventually, she just wrote it herself. My Eagle ceremony was 15 minutes. I didn’t invite any of my friends. The badge is now collecting dust under my dresser. I’ve never bothered to get it out from under there. I love Scouts, but I am not at all proud of my Eagle rank. When I think back to my project, I don’t think of helping little kids in a Title 1 public school; I think of the s— my mom used to do. It remains one of the worst experiences of my life.
Anyway, that’s the worst helicopter parent that I know.”
English As A SECOND Language
“I taught ESL to a bunch of high schoolers, many of which were at an SAT level. There was this one kid who was incredibly fluent and would write wonderful essays in my class.
However, his mother wasn’t satisfied. She forced him to write a 10000 word essay every single day. Now, she had never learned a foreign language, didn’t speak English, I don’t think she even graduated from college. But she would (through her son and other translators) give me an earful on how I was being too easy on the students because I wasn’t making them do 4 hours of homework a night.
And this poor kid… this unfortunate, 14 year-old bastard who was fluent in two languages and was ready to take the SATs in a language not his own ended up getting worse and worse at writing. He would repeat things again and again just to get the word count, because his mother would check the essays every night. (well, she’d check the numbers. She wouldn’t be able to read the paper.) He would lie and make up stories, interjecting them at weird places. He did ABSOLUTELY MISERABLY in his exams because he wouldn’t take my advice to “stop writing when you’ve run out of things to say”.”
Just Kill The Phone
“I was working with a class of gifted high school students taking a summer course. During a field trip one of my students needed to go to a doctors appointment and would be picked up early by her parents. The only way to contact the group on the field trip was my cell phone, so the parents got my personal number. In the week left in the summer course I received 23 text messages and 15 calls asking why their 10th grade daughter had not called them back.”
I Am Not My Roommate’s Keeper
“Freshman year of college my roommate’s mother was a helicopter mom. To an extreme. We weren’t friends, just roommates but I heard stories from multiple people.
One morning around 7am I hear a pounding on the door. I pull my ass out of bed and open it only to see her mother standing there looking beyond furious. Apparently she found out somehow that my roommate had been skipping one of her classes. She had driven two hours to show up at our door at 7am to scream at her 18 year old daughter. She also yelled at me for a few minutes for not waking up my roommate/not telling her to go class. I left pretty quickly and spent the rest of the day hiding out in friend’s dorm rooms.”
NO MEDIA!
“I’m not a teacher, but I’m in high school and I directed some of the kids in my school’s middle school division in a play of Treasure Island. One day, when we weren’t allowed access into the theater, we did a rehearsal at the house of this girl (let’s call her “G). Her mother (let’s call her “M”) invited us to come over, and at first I was wary as something always seemed a bit “off” about her, like she was always in an insane rush to get her daughter home after all of our regular rehearsals. But they had a very large house and I didn’t want to give up the space, so I agreed to do the rehearsal there.
Once we were there, M politely greeted us, but G was holed up in her room. I asked if she could come and join us, but M kept insisting we start the rehearsal without her. I explained to her that G was one of the most important parts of the play, and it would be hard to practice without her, but M just kept saying that she had work to do and wasn’t available.
Finally, after about half an hour, G came out to meet us, but her crazy mother told us that she could only stay for 15 minutes and then she had to go back to her work. G then turned to her mother and said, “I don’t have any work” to which M responded, “yes you do, sweetie” in the most passive-aggressive way I’ve ever heard someone talk to their child. I decided to stay out of it, and we started rehearsing with her.
I then opened my laptop to show them a video of what they did, but M happened to be walking past at the time, and she ran over and slammed my laptop’s lid down, shouting “No Media!” repeatedly and then lifted it up and ran away with it somewhere. It was my computer, so I followed her and asked for it back, and she carefully explained that they were a “no media” family and that it’s important that G isn’t exposed to that. She then said that her daughter should get back to work anyway, but I said we needed five more minutes.
When I got back to G, she said “Isn’t my mom so annoying?” and I wasn’t sure how to respond but G saw the uncertainty in my face and kept talking about her mother. It turned out that G wasn’t allowed to watch TV, go on any computer, even listen to music on an iPod, just do her schoolwork and read books that had already been read by her parents. She was in 6th Grade, so of course she didn’t have that much work to do, but her mother would make her study her notes from the day every day, and would frequently make her do homework again as it wasn’t long enough. G could have been getting straight As with less than half of the work she had to do, so I told M that she shouldn’t put so much pressure on her daughter, and she responded to that by kicking me out of the house. Her parents got divorced a year later and her father has full custody, and I couldn’t be happier.”
Get Him!!
“I’ve had a horrible helicopter parent week so this thread makes me feel like I’m in good (?) company and am not alone. The power that these parents have in coming into the classroom and changing how things are done is scary. I had 3 kids who were caught turning in the same paper and after giving them zeros for the assignment they got their parents to form a witch hunt. One of the parents rallied all the other parents in the class who all came in to hold a meeting about me and how I teach, even though none of them have been in my class or have talked with me personally. This is a highly advanced class and the LOWEST grade is a C which is really amazing. I’m actually super proud of all of them. Anyway, parents got the administration to have me allow them to redo the paper (essentially showing that I have zero authority for grades or to uphold high standards) AND I now must be extra evaluated because of the things these parents say I do in my class. Meanwhile I still have to teach these kids and act as a professional toward them, which I will. This behavior is unacceptable as a parent.”
Just Give Away The Grades
“Teacher at a private school in South Korea here. Every one of my students parents is a CH-47 Chinook of a parent. So the courses I teach are specifically geared for the students who want to study in the United States during college. I teach classes to prepare them for the SATs, I teach English conversation to help them be more fluent (although most of them were pretty good with English to begin with), and I teach in an American University style to help them get used to the format. The thing is, I essentially have no control over grades.
In principle I do because they are my classes but the reality is totally different. Because it’s a private school every one of the parents pays money to get their kids in and pay a whole lot more for them to be part of this international program. This means that if their kid isn’t doing well they have a pretty good chance of packing them up and taking them to a competing school. So because of this everyone of my students gets near perfect grades. Not because they earned them but because my principal has flat out told me that they all have to pass and do well even if they only ever sleep in class (and about half of them do).”
A Twist…
“Uncle was a teacher for 25 years at a fairly prestigious school and told me some fairly unbelievable horror stories, I’ll just talk about the one that sticks out in my mind.
He had taught several grades and at this point I believe he was teaching a 6th grade class. There was a boy in the class who was very… for lack of a better word stupid. This isn’t uncommon in schools but this kid was simply thicker than brick and couldn’t seem to grasp anything that was being taught to him, catch 22 is he had a father who was the chief of police in town and mother who worked closely with the mayor.
Anyways – my uncle had been teaching a chapter in history and assigning homework for day, when the boy stood up and started yelling about how stupid history was and that my uncle was dumb for attempting to teach it to them. Needless to say the boy was sent to the office for verbally abusing a teacher, this is where the story gets somewhat interesting. While the boy was in the office he had begun crying and started to fabricate a story about how my uncle had called him an idiot outright in the classroom and that all he did was retort saying “No I’m not jerk” or something to that effect. He then began requesting to speak to his parents, of course the headmaster obliged and let him call his parents and at the same time summoned my uncle to the office to discuss what was going on. 5 minutes later as my uncle had just finished explaining what had happened both the boys parents burst into the office, guns blazing if you will(not literally),the husband attempted to arrest him with his wife basically spitting in my uncles face as she was yelling at him. All the while their boy was sitting there smiling and apparently laughing as my uncle was taken from the room by the chief of police, all pretty absurd. As you can imagine with a full room of witnesses in the children, the actual story came to light fairly quickly but instead of apologizing and trying to save face, the husband began telling a tale of how my uncle had resisted arrest and reacted forcefully and “struck” him as he was attempting to gain control over him in the office. I found out later that both the parents approached the headmistress after the fact and offered her an ultimatum, to agree with what they were saying or they would make her life a living hell – all instead of simply admitting they were wrong. The husband lost his job and the wife was severely demoted to desk clerk after everyone figured she tried to use her position as leverage in the situation.
And as if this whole thing wasn’t humorous enough my uncle still swears to this day “Nailing the headmistress saved my life, definitely my career”.. what a lovely man he is.”
Safety First
“I had a parent come in with their child a year ago with one of those “WiFi/Cellphone Radiation Detector” thingies, and DURING THE FIRST 5 MINUTES OF CLASS walked around the room, him in tow.
She finally pointed to a seat for him to sit in, and then came up to me and asked if there was any way I could make the building maintenance staff aware that the radiation levels were still quite high.
ALSO, had a different parent year before that ask me to NOT use both the chalkboard and whiteboard. In any class. I can understand the chalkboard during class, because I have had kids with asthma who react, but the whiteboard? And EVER? How did she expect me to teach?”
Always Hovering
“A colleague of mine in my school has had the most helicopter parent I have seen in my 8 years of education.
This mother, middle eastern descent in a 96% Caucasian school, felt that in first grade that each school and grade level should be voting for a child that was the voted master of their peers. She felt that he would one day be the president of the United States and that his early elementary public education should reflect so. She felt that he should be voted upon to rule the rest of the grade level delegating responsibilities to his peers. Mind you he had just turned 5 and had skipped kindergarten based upon parent request in spite of his kindergarten level formative assessment levels.
She forced her child’s teacher to have him present Powerpoints each month on complicated issues such as segregation and photosynthesis. She would come in on these days to video tape these presentations that were clearly done by her. She would keep him after school 3 times a week to make sure his reading points not only met what was expected, but was 10 times what was expected. She left the district this year with her children in search of a private school where a second grader could be voted as the master of all grades k-6 to learn leadership of his peers. Bless her heart.”
Bueller….Bueller….Bueller
“Had a student last year where his mother was always claiming he had some health issue that was pretty serious. While I hate calling people liars, she would make it obvious. The best example I can give is her claiming he had severe asthma. I made every accommodation I could for this kid including everytime he complained of chest pains I would send him to the nurse immediately. I began to wonder when I would see him at recess running around like a maniac without any complaints. He only got chest pains during a test or whenever it was convenient for him. Never questioned it because I just didn’t want to even try to argue.
Another example is during science we were playing on microscopes and he thought it would be ok to just run around the room. Of course I kicked him out and told him he flunked science. Well at the end of the day I had a change of heart and made him read a chapter out of the science book and write a summary for homework. The next day he comes in with this elaborate 3d model of the chapter and his summary is written in pen and the writing looks like a grown woman’s, not a fourth grade boy. I ask him to tell me about the chapter and of course he can’t so I call his mom. She proceeds to tell me that he spent hours on this thing and she watched him do it. I call her out and explain he cant tell me anything. She admits she helped but feels there nothing wrong with her writing for him or constructing the model.
She was and still is psycho. She called me last week asking for $30 for rent money. I cant wait until he goes to middle school.”
It’s The Teacher’s Fault
“A student handed in a quiz completely blank. I asked her why, and she replied “I didn’t read” and smiled. I told her to write “I didn’t read” on the quiz so there would be no misunderstanding. She did.
I e-mailed her Mom because the quiz caused her grade to drop from a low C to a D+, and we have to contact parents of students with D’s or F’s. Her mom went absolutely NUTS. “How can any teacher in good conscience allow a student to receive a zero… I thought you were supposed to guide her and support her!” She demanded that I give her daughter at least fifty points. Just because.”
Defense
“Music teacher here. For discipline, I use the 3-strikes-you’re-out method. With Kindergarten I use the “happy face/sad face” on the white board, dependent upon behavior each day.
I had a parent sneak into my classroom during my lunch period and erase his son’s name from the “sad face list” on the board, claiming that he “got a feeling” while he was at work that his son was being mistreated at school. He could only believe that I had wrongfully accused his son of something, because his son was an angel. He picked the lock to come in and “defend” his son!”
Aw, Innocently Racist! How Adorable! Not.
“I work in college housing.
Last year, I worked at a small midwestern university, the demographics are 90% white kids. A staff member was from Ghana and had set up this international student sponsorship program with the government officials, it was really awesome. The students, weren’t to arrive until a week or so after college classes started. I informed my student staff of this and also told them to inform their residents that people of different cultures have different customs, and to make sure they feel welcome to campus.
I received a call from a mother shortly after student staff had their meetings, saying that her son was concerned that his new roommate would smell. I inquired further, and she said that her son told her that her new roommate was from an African country and the mother did ‘research’ online and found that international students tend to not bathe as frequently as Americans. She then suggested that we house them separately from the American students.
I told her we do not assign rooms by race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. She again brought up housing them together. So I said something along the lines of, “Excuse me ma’am but, you’re suggesting that we separate the African students from the American students. Do you recognize the historical significance of how utterly insulting this is?””