The future depends on an educated population, and the education for the future depends on teachers today.

However, most people have used the fact that teachers are public employees to make demands because, “You work for me.” Without evaluating the appropriateness of their school experiences most people claim that having been a student in school they have a total understanding of everything that goes into teaching, although they conveniently forget that as students what they were dealing with was student experiences and learning, not teaching and interpersonal interactions involving a correct approach to all students according to their individual needs.

A simple fact that, although well known by teachers who have a responsibility to deal with roughly 150 kids a day, but not so much by the families of those students who have a handful of children, is that not all families are the same and functional, that each child will behave in class and have an appreciation of learning that reflects the diversities in their background, and that not everyone will agree with or accept what is taught.

It might appear to be generalization for the uninitiated, but the greater the parents’ respect and recognition of the need to learn what will make the child’s future brighter, the less the micro-managing, while parents with a poor attitude for the same are more likely to file complaints mainly influenced by their inner child who either did not do well in school for educationally based reasons, had a familial negative attitude toward education, or just had bad parents.

For years as a Special Education teacher in other places, parents were glad that there was an opportunity for their child to have a better future in spite of any measured limitations, and worked with the Special Ed teachers to help in that process.

Although they might not have agreed with everything, they did not take up the majority of their time looking for things they could see as slights or things wrongfully done.

When I arrived in Oklahoma, for the first time I met parents who for some reason assumed any idea that their child did not already know something was an attack, and, as education is all about revealing to the child things they have yet to learn their defenses against these attacks were on-going.

I had parents complain that I was making their child memorize the times tables up to the point where they reached their limit in memorization so they would not be reliant on charts and calculators because they had never learned their times table and were doing quite well, relatively speaking if the comparison was just between neighbors and not the greater society.

When I would explain how things were in other parts of the country when we were covering history, civics, and geography, there were time I was accused of attempting to turn the kids against their home state because if that wasn’t my intention, I should only tell them about Oklahoma.

I had a more difficult time getting the parents to accept what their kids needed to learn than I had getting the kids to learn things. I wss reminded many times that as the child was Special Ed, I should not attempt to go beyond some nebulous, undefined limit because to do so would harm the child when in reality it allowed the kids to stretch their abilities beyond the assumed limits.

Many complaints were brought to the principal directly based solely on what the child had said without the parent talking to me for verification. The child’s word was the truth even if it was merely offered as an excuse by the student to excuse some failure on bis part either as a grade or a behavior. One such complaint was that in explaining something in History class I had not presented the Southern Baptists viewpoint and, therefore, was anti-religion directly assaulting the sensibilities of the child, in reality the parents.

When I transferred to a high school to teach Regular Education English, I found that this continued.

A poster of Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies was seen by a parent as advocating abortion, the opening lines of Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon was some satanic elfin language, my Yom Shoah display was seen as an attack on Christianity somehow, and too many parents had some complaint about a work of literature and wanted it banned from my classroom. The Red Badge of Courage did not present the Southern States in a positive light.

The few times a parent came to me directly I was able to explain to their satisfaction why something was taught by me or read by their child, but, more often than not in my case and most others, the parents went directly to the administration who would then placate the parent rather than educate them because the former was easier than the latter.

The greatest example of this was my being the subject of multiple sermons in multiple Baptist churches on a certain Sunday advocating for prayer and action to cease my teaching a certain class and for my removal from the school when such a class did not exist, because one parent had claimed to her pastor that it did. Rather than talk to me, the pastors gave their sermons and riled up their congregations, only to realize they had acted rashly when they finally came to the school after the fact to get the facts.

I received directives to cease joking in class with my students because one had complained to her parents that she did not get a joke and others had to explain it to her thus reducing her self-esteem, and was advised that before I hung anything in my classroom or brought up in a lesson anything anyone might find controversial, I was to run it by the principal, such as, for example, the opening lines of Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon that some parent might not see as anything but satanic.

The result for me and other teachers, was that with 150 students on any given day, there were 150 ideations of parents that could find fault with anything.

I spent a lot of time dealing with complaints that upon examination were shown to be just plain odd and a personal offense to one person for imagined reasons, and at one such meeting only got the issue straightened out when the parents who had been spewing Bible verses at me realized I knew the Bible well enough to counter each of their quotes with another and that, although the parent claimed the complaints were based on Christianity, I was able to point out that the hurled verses were from the Old Testament while mine were all from the New. It was my knowledge of the Bible that won the day, not the parent seeing that there were things they might not know that their child needed to learn.

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A common threat by students who did not like a grade, wanted to avoid an assignment, or felt the teacher did not “respect” them to the level they demanded which was basically just accepting their privilege based desires and behavior, which often meant allowing them to do whatever whenever, was that they would tell their parents and they would have the teacher lose the job.

In spite of my having been out on a pre-cleared personal day to deal with the gas company replacing a line in my apartment, I had to attend a disciplinary meeting to address a parental complaint received from the child for something objectionable I had done in class on the day I was not in the room and had papers to so prove.

One major complaint by a student to her parent based on the misrepresentation of something in my classroom which the parent brought not only to the principal but to the media, was found upon examination by the media which thought it had a great salacious news story that would take days to cover, to be without merit or newsworthiness as what was actually there did not in any way come close to the parent’s claim.

There was no financial cost to my defense as complaints were easily dispelled when addressed, just a waste of time better spent on other things.

That could change soon for those people teaching in Oklahoma. It goes beyond annoyance to financial burden.

Republican Senator Rob Standridge has introduced a bill to allow people to sue teachers if they bring anything into their classroom or lesson that does not agree with the religious beliefs held by students and, by extension, their families’.

Named the “Students’ Religious Belief Protection Act” the bill would allow any parent to demand the removal of any book with perceived anti-religious content from the classroom or the school. Teachers could be sued a minimum of $10,000 “per incident, per individual” and must be paid out of the teachers pocket with any outside source for the funds such crowd sourcing being grounds for termination. If teachers, therefore, are unable to pay the fine or fines, thay are to be terminated as well.

The bill does not specify any religious belief system or individual belief so it is extremely open to misuse. There is a more potent meaning to the age old attempt to get out of taking a test because it goes against the students religion.

The justification of the bill is that it is  

“necessary for the preservation of the public peace”,

and if passed, will take effect immediately.

What is the definition of public peace if not in this case sheltering religious beliefs from new ideas as the expense of everyone else?

Any information that is important to Gay students will cost a teacher $10,000 or the job. Any scientific information that is not Biblically base can not even be a topic of discussion even if there is no pressure to accept it because things like the Big Bang and evolution are an assault on Genesis. Math could even be a target as the teachers will be using Arabic numbers and Arabic is the language of anti-American terrorists.

This same representative has already introduced a bill to ban books with references to identity, sex, gender and racial issues from public school libraries they do not comport with a parent’s religion.

One might potentially be able to tell students that Ruby Bridges was the first Black child to attend an all-white school, but explaining segregation or describing the virulent verbal assaults she faced must be omitted. The children should be led to believe it was accepted joyfully by good Christian people.

Teachers already deal with enough. Beyond their direct and indirect teaching duties, they now have pre-censor every lesson, be careful when answering a student’s question, or saying anything no matter how innocent, if it can be perceived by some parent to have been an attack on their child’s religion at the cost of $10,000 per complaint or loss of job for the teacher.

During Covid people lamenting the lack of healthy teachers that made remote learning necessary, and every expert, real or self-appointed were constant in explaining the harm this was doing to children.

What further harm will be done to children if what they learn is limited by the fear of even one costly complaint or the lack of teachers who got terminated because they chose to feed their children rather than pay the fine, or simply walk away because no one should be treated like this especially since to have the job a teacher needs a degree and continuing education while meeting other state requirements only to have all that wiped out because a parent who never learned his times tables finds a way to frame a complaint on some foggy religious reason or believes the opening lines of Beowulf are somehow satanic and an assault on religion?

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