As parents are yelling and screaming at school board meetings, claiming the schools are teaching, rather, indoctrinating students about subjects they are actually not teaching, and have included in their  repertoire of street theater, more to get the videos on the net than actually having the education of their kids at heart, death threats to teachers and board members because they chose to believe something is being done based on an incestuous form of passing misinformation off as truth.

The GOP is claiming that these parents are merely expressing their objections to what is not actually being taught and have a right to bring their concerns to the board. Yes, they do, but not like they are doing it, especially when leaders in the GOP to whom they would listen, say nothing to set the matter straight.

Of course, this is the same political party that now sees the invasion of the Capitol Building on January 6, as merely tourists taking in the sights while some may have been exercising their constitutional rights and freely speaking what was on their minds.

A result of the perpetuation of the fiction that Critical Race Theory and Socialism are being taught to children is the GOP and others pushing the idea that parents should control what is or isn’t taught in schools, or what specifically their own children should learn.

Since public schools do not just teach so the parents have a smarter kid, but so that they can have the opportunity to grow into successful and happy people who contribute to society and lead. They do not educate for the parents but for society, for all of us. Parents who want to limit their own child’s education can always home school them, place them in a specialized school that sticks to limit beliefs and limited curriculum, or create their own schools for like-minded parents.

But they have no right to demand what a school teaches to everyone.

I met many parents and groups of parents, organizations, and crusaders singly or in groups in a variety of schools in different places and on different grade levels. Few, if any, had experience teaching a classroom full of kids with varying backgrounds, yet they knew how it should be done.

It was not rare that they demanded what should be done, even if their demands were, for the most part, not as ostentatiously theatrical as we see in all the videos.

After all who watches C-SPAN to watch the silence of the voting process, but who doesn’t watch the fist fights that break out occasionally in that Asian country when its parliament erupts.

These are some experiences with parents throughout my career. I kept it to one per location, but they were certainly not the only ones. Parent’s night from the teachers’ sides of the desks are not all the smiles, tea, and cupcakes we prefer they be.

I began my public-school teaching career back when Special Education was relatively new with states passing many laws that would take time to fully understand, and information filling in the facts about various challenges and ways to deal with them, those in charge of school districts really were not aware of what Special Ed really was.

They were educated in a system where there was “Readin’, Ritin’, and “Rithmatic”, and wre now in charge of those systems and the world was changing faster than they could give up the way it had alays been. When it came to Special Needs kids, they were used to people who were deaf or blind, usually knowing about them more than having had any actual experience working with them, and people with Down Syndrome who to them were always cute and just needed to be kept busy, but they were away in special places.

That changed.

By law these kids were now I the public schools as they had a right to be.

Special Ed teachers often found themselves working in a field that was run by misconceptions of well-meaning administrators as the categories beyond the comfortable acceptance of, but with the awkward approach to those three what was beyond their knowledge and often were too difficult for the old people who ran many school boards to grasp at the time. All those other categories, like the class I was assigned, students who were diagnosed as Emotionally Disturbed, were treated more according to school boards’ impressions than school boards being informed.

They thought it sufficient to assign someone as the director of the department who had been in a non-core curriculum department because there was something special about a reading class as opposed math. They may have done their best, but it was best only for them and not the students.

As a result, they would place students in classes they thought were the correct one, and these assessments were often very incorrect. And they assumed a really undisciplined kid was “emotionally disturbed” and would often get the pest out of the general population and into a less interactive one.

Incorrigible kids from poorly parented home were considered Emotionally disturbed when they were simply socially maladjusted and could have had their behavior modified by holding the parents more responsible for their up bringing and getting them the help for that. In my class I had students who were constantly getting arrested for breaking and entering homes and getting arrested, and who may have been given the choice by a judge to have good school attendance or spend time in jail. Juvenile Hall was an attractive goal in theory as it would enhance a reputation among peers, but it was a horrifying prospect when it was a real possibility. Students who were only in school for punishment were placed in my class with an Autistic kid when Autism was still a great unknown.

I had one student whose major reason for being in my class was his being totally undisciplined and who, we were to find lout, only had to follow rules at school while at home his freedom to do as he wished without any limits was promoted by the parents. He did not want to follow any rules at school and his parents supported him in that choice. His standing in the middle of a major road and holding up traffic was something he simply chose to do and the parents simply allowed as they viewed him from their chairs on the front porch while finding fault with the people in he held up cars for yelling at him to get off the road.

At the point in his freshman year of high school at which he had become more of an adult and less the cute child, his parents found themselves with an uncontrolled person in their house who at his high school size was becoming threatening. They wanted discipline to begin, and, so, there was a meeting with his parents and all his teachers to come up with a strategy where this could be achieved. In the attempt to come up with his Individual Education Plan to create a way to get him to act more correctly in social situations teachers offered different strategies,

Each suggestion was rejected by the parents as each would curtail his unfettered freedom and they did not want anyone to tell him what to do. The plan they wanted would somehow be effective without having anything in it that would have made it so. They criticized everything that had been done and rejected anything that could be done if it meant he could not have is way in all things or be allowed to do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted.

Their signature on the final plan was gotten only when a his History teacher demanded that as they were rejecting every suggestion offered to help them get the son they wanted now, one who would suddenly obey them when that was never required previously and to which the kid objected, and as they were the ones who screwed him up and seemed not to want anyone to do anything that might end the screw up as they now wanted, they come up with the plan the school should follow and we would see if it was something we could do. Otherwise, there were other more restrictive placements than the local high school.

It was only then that they mellowed in their demands and the students had to agree to follow the rules or face consequences. He rebelled at This way, you can know which part is dysfunctional in case the helicopter fails to work and you can easily find a reputed pharmacy. generic cialis online They don’t exhaust so easily and their marital and sexual continue reading for info discounts on cialis life as well. If you buy Propecia online Australia, it is a lot cheaper than other market prices. pfizer viagra prix Too much masturbation can invite the liver problems, because frequent erections provide strain on the liver. levitra 20 mg first, but like a wild stallion was finally brought to the point where his entrance into a room did not introduce the fear in others of what he might do to anything or anybody.

The parents filed a complaint that their desires had been ignored by all the teachers and staff and demanded we be disciplined if not fired.

In California, while teaching a history class, I explained what the Nazis believed when we got to the build up to World War II. A parent then objected to my indoctrinating the students and promoting the beliefs of the Nazis, and demanded that I be disciplined and, perhaps, fired, for promoting an ideology that went against her Christian-American beliefs.

She and some other parents demanded that covering the Nazis be removed from the history curriculum as to them explaining and informing was tantamount to recruiting. Luckily, the school, in spite of the parents’ exaggerated public misrepresenting of the content and its inclusion in the class and textbook, chose not to remove the reasons for WWII from the syllabus.

At another school a few years later, I thought my newly assigned Special Ed students were being held back by the wrongful assumption that as Special Ed kids were limited in the level of their educational achievement, their educational goals should be also. This went against my experience. If there was a ceiling to the level of their learning offer them so much that each will arrive at their limit, some sooner than others, but they will all hit their limit. My Special Ed class in Los Angeles, assumed to be incapable of even getting close to other students in math achievement learned algebra as a game, not a school subject, and accepted the math team’s challenge. The math team was more serious and ponderous in solving algebraic equations while my kids, treating it like a game, would finish first. They also became the model of a district video instruction program because of the great videos they were assumed unable to actually produce.

The kids in this class had these big plastic, spring-loaded Play-Skool looking calculators that they used for multiplication. They were lost without them.

Rather than set a level and hold the students could only learn up to it, my practice had always been to throw it all at them and let each grasp what they could according to their actual limits. So, I made copies of the Times Tables up to ten and gave each student three copies to be placed at home, one on the toilet tank lid, one on the wall opposite the toilet, and one anywhere they so choose. Obviously over the impending vacation they would have to use the bathroom and whether it was Number One or Number two, whenever they did, they would have to see the times tables and could not use the excuse they had never had the time to look at them.

I received parental complaints, and these led to meetings between the parent, the principal, and myself.

At one meeting the parent was livid that I had referred to the toilet in class, apparently because there was something unacceptable in that and suggested it would have been acceptable to tell the students to put it on the front of the fridge. Everyone goes to the fridge, sure, but no one stares at the front of it. They open the door and stare at what is behind the door. Everybody poops and pees, and they could use something to look at.

Another parent was angry that I was forcing his kid to learn something that was too demanding and unnecessary. As he explained, he didn’t know his times tables and he was doing just fine, so his kid could do just as well not knowing his. He worked at a shop of some kind begun by his father and provided a subsistence income, but nothing that allowed for anything beyond survival, and he thought this would be sufficient for his son’s future in a world that was changing. 

Another parent complained that by telling the students they had to learn something it was demeaning them as that implied that they did not know something.  Her argument was that the kids have learned enough and finding there was more out there that they didn’t know would make them think less of themselves.

A number found fault with my explaining to the students that it was to their advantage to learn as much as they can, and like with previous generations, that meant more than what was available to their parents so that, no matter where life took them, they would be successful. To these parents, this was advocating that they leave their home state and move away, an obvious sign that I hated the home state and turning their children against it, or I would teach to ensure they stayed around.

Teaching only that which would perpetuate the status quo and keep the kids at home was what they wanted.

Apparently the purpose of school, to explain the unknown and teach skills not yet acquired, was lost on them.

At the high school to which I had transferred, I hung the poster of Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies in my classroom. I always liked its macabre humor, and it made a nice decoration on the institutionally painted walls. The burgeoning Goth kids loved it.

However, there were parental complaints which, at first, I did not understand. The principal forwarded a summary of the complaints that stated I had a poster in my room that advocated for the killing of children and by extension promoted abortion. The demand was that the pro-abortion poster be removed and me with it. As there was nothing pr-abortion in my room, I was at a loss as to what it was until the principal had one of the parents show her the poster and saw the complaint for what it was.

At that same school, after I had asked the Faculty Advisory Board to consider a student survey that would assess the school’s environment for its inclusion of all students and if it was a safe environment, one it its member’s misrepresenting the initial request as a done deal to her Baptist pastor resulted in Sunday sermons being delivered in the churches this pastor had contacted about this horror, condemning the class on Homosexuality being taught at the school an demanding the course be stopped and the teacher of it be fired. The Sunday morning sermons were followed that evening by the pastors’ going to the principal’s house to make a formal demand, and my getting ripped the following morning by the principal who chose not to agree that the only fault here was with the pastors who jumped to conclusions and made a stink out of something that was not there, but to blame me for their jumping.

There was no class to remove and no teacher to fire, and, even though the pastors admitted their rash judgment was in error, their congregations were slower to accept this reality, so the teacher, me, got death threats on my old fashion answering machine and in letters put in my teacher mailbox with no stamp, meaning they were delivered by hand by someone on campus, or were sent through the inter-school mail system which meant it came from other employees.

This made simple trips to the grocery store near my place a little awkward, a parents would actually shield their children when I passed by or express their displeasure of me as a teacher of children.

Now these are, as I said, samples to illustrate my fear of what could happen if parents actually are in charge of what will be taught to other people’s children whether or not their parents agree with what topics are chosen by other parents who may be the most theatrical.

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