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Home : 2001 : October : 13

Parents
By Sabrina

The majority of my parents are kind, supportive, and willing to admit that their children's shortcomings are their children's faults (and not mine). However, it just takes a few wackos to ruin everything. It's worse when
you have a pricipal like mine who always sides with them. But today I had a very eye-opening experience regarding parents. Recently the other fifth grade teacher developed a social studies project that we had both of our classes complete. Since we do team teaching, between the two of us we teach all the fifth graders, so approximately 100 fifth graders were assigned the project. One

mom told me repeatedly how happy she was with the project. (Of course, I could not take the credit, since it was the other teacher who developed the project.) Two weeks later dozens of lovely projects came in. As I was grading the projects, I ran across a nasty note from a mom attached to her kid's project. This mom (also a teacher at another school) seems to send me a note every week regarding such petty issues as somebody stealing her kid's pencil. Anyway, the note attached to the project stated that the project was not age appropriate. "I can't wait until she comes in and sees all the other kids who are her child's age who could do the project," I thought angrily. I began to feel bad that I could take this criticism personally but could not take the other mom's compliment personally. Then I thought it through. One mom LOVED the project. Another mom criticized it. The other parents just kept their mouths shut about the project, many of the kids were thrilled to do it, and the assignment produced grades all over the spectrum. In general, it seemed like a success. Clearly this event is an illustration that you can't please everyone.