In Teach for America
Two years ago I wrote a post about a crazy teacher. This past year I had a very crazy parent. Now that I'm far enough removed, I can finally tell the story. I legally can't use real names, so they've been altered.
The student of this parent had severe emotional problems. That much wasn't news to anybody at my school, as many teachers knew about it and told me how they coped with it. The addition of hormones to the mix this past year is what really set the year into a downward spiral for all involved. He came to the age where he challenged authority in a huge way. Couple that with emotional control issues, and the impact was on his behavior and grades.
In addressing these problems, I of course turned to his grandmother, Mrs. Smith. I talked to her a number of times about her grandson's behavior after school when she picked him up. On roughly the second such encounter I gently broke the news that he had received a referral at school today. He made the slightest, "But..." and she instinctively backhanded him across the face.
As the year progressed the meetings at the curb became a regular occurence. Mrs. Smith knew something was wrong and decided, to her credit, to enroll her grandson in a mental health clinic. I was really happy for the student, but there was no noticeable change in his behavior or coping skills when he returned, three weeks later.
When Mrs. Smith saw that her grandson was still acting the same way, she began to place the blame on me. I was somehow the cause of her son's problems because he didn't have so many of them before being in my class, according to her.
Once she got this notion in her head and she got a call from me or the front office about her son, she would come to school and want to find out for herself what happened that caused the referral. So, she would come find my class (usually during recess) and hold a little court room of her own, where she was the crazy judge, I was on trial, and the students were the witnesses. This of course gave disgruntled kids the ability to voice their frustration with me to what seemed like a legitimate person, and thus significantly decreased my authority.
After it happened the second time, I decided enough was enough. I pulled Mrs. Smith aside and told her that if in the future she wanted to talk about her grandson, she needed to talk to me directly and not to pull the class into any of it. She was utterly puzzled as to why she couldn't do it and asked why. I explained that it undermined my authority and that kids frustrated at missing their recess in no way paint an accurate picture of what goes on in my classroom. She didn't really understand and I reiterated that it can't happen again, to which she replied, "But Mr. Hughes -- all I'm trying to do is find out what happened. That's all!" She then pointed her finger at one of the girls in my class (11 years old) and said, "Ask her! Ask her, Mr. Hughes. That's all I was trying to do!"
And there it was. She invoked the defensive reasoning of an elementary school student: "I didn't do it! Ask him." She essentially thought that students were peers and couldn't recognize the difference between our level as adults and that of the students.
That should have been a huge clue to me when it came to our class trip to Washington, DC. I allowed her grandson to come on the trip on the condition that she come with because I could not trust him 1,000 miles away from home. Mrs. Smith was one of the parents on the trip that got really upset at me. Needless to say, she wasn't my biggest fan when we finally got back to Greenville. In fact, I don't think she spoke to me for the entire last day of the trip.
About a week after the trip, I gave the parents that chaperoned all a framed 8x10 picture of their son or daughter in DC as a token of appreciation for them giving up a week to come on the trip. I hand delivered mine to Mrs. Smith in an attempt to smooth things over, and it went better than I could have imagined. When she saw it, she yelled, "Thank you, Mr. Hughes! This is so nice! Thank Jesus for you! Thank Jesus!"
Not long after the trip to DC, things with the student in my class were started getting really bad. In short, the student took on the role of a victim when he decided to misbehave and manipulated the class into supporting him as a "victim". It got so bad that my school administration decided that it was best for everybody to pull him out and put him in the crazy teacher's class for the remainder of the year.
The class was far below his level, academically, but Mrs. Smith didn't really care; she was just happy that I wasn't teaching her grandson anymore. Can you guess what's going to happen next? You're probably right. The kid acted the exact same way with the other teacher! And what did the other teacher do? Instead of clear-cut rules and loss of certain privileges, she intimidated and probably beat him. That was her classroom management system. She always kept her door locked and kept a paddle locked in a cage. No joke. That'll make them productive members of society!
Just before he transferred classes, report cards had come out and he did, let's say, less than well. The thing is, I had written the wrong student's grades on his report card. So I had to white them out and put the correct ones on there. Mrs. Smith asked me about it, and brought it to the school's attention, thinking that I gave him bad grades on purpose ... except that I had progress reports with similar grades and his grandmother's signature on them, along with all the assignments. I even excused all the assignments from when the student was at the mental health clinic.
Well, his new, crazy teacher loved to assert her supposed authority as the craziest, most in-charge teacher around and saw this as an opportunity to do just that -- but not overtly of course. So she got Mrs. Smith to believe that I did in fact alter grades. Then, at the end of the year award ceremony, I gave my "Outstanding Parent" awards to the parents who volunteered for the DC trip. I called out Mrs. Smith's name and she didn't get up to get the award, and I couldn't figure out why. I thought maybe she didn't want to get up from the back.
I didn't think anything of it, and then in the foyer of my school afterward, she came up to me in front of 150+ people and started screaming at me about the report card. I tried to reason with her, not remembering the time when she appealed to elementary school logic. Then she said, "If I ever see you on the street, you better turn and walk the other way!"
Someone finally stepped up and ushered her away as everybody stood there silent and watching.
Afterward, some of my kids came up to me and one of them said, "Don't worry, Mr. Hughes. She's crazy." I chuckled a little and then we took this picture.
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Something that struck me as interesting that I haven't seen or heard mentioned is that Juliet is a fertility doctor. On face value it didn't make a lot of sense to me. Why would there be a fertility doctor on the island, especially when they are stealing children? Then it hit me: fertility doctor of what?
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I had several thoughts about the significance of his last name. At first I thought it might be some sort of nod to 
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