We'll Agree To Disagree

Last Friday we finally had our meeting with Youngest child's teacher, Ms Crazy and the school principal.  Needless to say, she denied saying anything about my wife, saying that the children must have misunderstood, but she did acknowledge that she does not believe that there were ever any dinosaurs.

I did find it interesting that the onus was put entirely on us.  The first words out of the principal's mouth were "what do you want to do?".  Fortunately, I do have some experience in adversarial meetings like this, and I had already marshaled my thoughts.  As I saw it, there were three options available to us:

1. Demand a full investigation 
2. Switch our daughter to the other teaching group
3. Let it go, and hope for the best

The first option was what we were hoping for, though I was never optimistic about it.  Barring a police report, schools are loathe to initiate investigations involving the children.  The school would need to interview all of the children, and in the process get parental permission for all of these interviews.  This would blow the issue way up, and make our daughter the center of a controversy.  Since Ms Crazy is popular with some of her students, there would invariably be some kind of blowback on Youngest child.

My wife and I had discussed option 2 at some length.  The way things are set up at this school, there are two "teams" of teachers in the core classes: Math, Science, Language Arts, and Social Studies.  We already knew that it would not be possible to simply switch Social Studies teachers, Youngest child would have to switch out all of her teachers in these four core classes, and get placed in different classes for all of her other subjects.  Youngest child really loves her homeroom teacher, and switching her would be somewhat traumatic. Additionally, we've had experience with the Science teacher on the other team, and we would rather take our chances with Ms Crazy than go through the probems that this Science teacher will create for us.

In the end, option 3 was what we ended up with. 

Our concern here was that somehow our daughter would not receive fair treatment in the class.  Until now, there have been no problems with her grades, and the gist of the parent teacher conference that started this whole thing was that Youngest child was a good student. Ms Crazy assured us that she had no ill feelings toward our daughter, and that Youngest child would get a fair shake.   The principal apologized for the misunderstanding, and stated that he would monitor the situation.

Since then, Youngest child says that Ms Crazy isn't treating her any differently, and things are more or less back to normal.  We have heard that the principal has been spending some time in the classroom with Ms Crazy, and I did get the impression that this is not a done deal with him by any stretch.

So we'll see what happens.

~Easy

tags: school  

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit