Independent School Teacher Pet Peeve Thread

[Anonymous]

My pet peeve is crazy parents who take over the one thread for teachers to vent and start a flame war over gifted issues.

[Anonymous]

To me, it went off the rails on page three, with this post at 9/16/11 @ 10:27:

Anonymous wrote:
I just have to say I think it's so sad that the attitudes of teachers as documented on this thread would make a parent with an important question about his or her son's needs feel like it would be offensive to bring it up. Even more upsetting is that some parents would rather let their child's needs go unmet than risk annoying a teacher about their special snowflake.

Some of the teachers who have posted here about parent's of advanced children should reconsider their position. There is nothing wrong with speaking to your child's teacher (be it the first day or 3 months in) if you geniunely feel it's needed. If you as a teacher feel like there is good reason not to accelerate than just explain your reasoning and come up with a plan. I think teachers are too quick to disregard parents in many instances.

Here is a blog about a little girl and her family who had such a horrendous time dealing with their school. This thread reminds me of it.
http://educatingarchie.com/?m=200905

Unless anybody else has a better candidate. I have no idea if this poster is the "PG Crusader." But I think a lot of us are using (abusing?) the thread to let the poster know that we've seen this sort of thing before, and don't want to see it again.

[Anonymous]

Please, carry on! Post some more teacher peeves!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My pet peeve is crazy parents who take over the one thread for teachers to vent and start a flame war over gifted issues. [/quote

Agreed!

Hi there. I am the PP from WAY back who asked what a teacher would do on their own if such a rare gifted child were to appear in their class. I have not posted since then. I would like to thank the teachers who responded. And I apologize for sparking the derailment.

My question was meant to be relevant to the "pet peeves" of the teachers. And it was meant for small children in early grades . Teachers don't want to hear parents say how bright their child is and believe it or not, there are some parents that don't want to "say anything" to teachers or a new school to avoid being "labeled". The hope being, all will be fine, the school chosen is hopefully the right match for the child and that the teachers and school will notice anything relevant and will contact the family if they feel the child needs anything. In addition, they may contact the family to say what they can or cannot do for that child given their classroom environment.

So I was curious from the teacher side of things, if you encountered a 1 in 10 yrs child in you class and the parents had NOT come forward, what would you do? Anything? Again this is at very young grades.

Some teachers did already say what they can do to work with younger kids but nobody said whether they would tell the family anything. I am curious whether the pet peeve about families boasting is so large that a teacher might not want to tell the parents when they truly do find a child who really is an outlier.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My pet peeve is crazy parents who take over the one thread for teachers to vent and start a flame war over gifted issues. [/quote

Agreed!

Hi there. I am the PP from WAY back who asked what a teacher would do on their own if such a rare gifted child were to appear in their class. I have not posted since then. I would like to thank the teachers who responded. And I apologize for sparking the derailment.

My question was meant to be relevant to the "pet peeves" of the teachers. And it was meant for small children in early grades . Teachers don't want to hear parents say how bright their child is and believe it or not, there are some parents that don't want to "say anything" to teachers or a new school to avoid being "labeled". The hope being, all will be fine, the school chosen is hopefully the right match for the child and that the teachers and school will notice anything relevant and will contact the family if they feel the child needs anything. In addition, they may contact the family to say what they can or cannot do for that child given their classroom environment.

So I was curious from the teacher side of things, if you encountered a 1 in 10 yrs child in you class and the parents had NOT come forward, what would you do? Anything? Again this is at very young grades.

Some teachers did already say what they can do to work with younger kids but nobody said whether they would tell the family anything. I am curious whether the pet peeve about families boasting is so large that a teacher might not want to tell the parents when they truly do find a child who really is an outlier.

Possibly you should start a new thread with your question, so the teachers can get back to peeves.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:17:08, allow me to congratulate you on your correct use of ellipses....

I thought ellipses should only contain three dots...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My pet peeve is crazy parents who take over the one thread for teachers to vent and start a flame war over gifted issues. [/quote

Agreed!

Hi there. I am the PP from WAY back who asked what a teacher would do on their own if such a rare gifted child were to appear in their class. I have not posted since then. I would like to thank the teachers who responded. And I apologize for sparking the derailment.

My question was meant to be relevant to the "pet peeves" of the teachers. And it was meant for small children in early grades . Teachers don't want to hear parents say how bright their child is and believe it or not, there are some parents that don't want to "say anything" to teachers or a new school to avoid being "labeled". The hope being, all will be fine, the school chosen is hopefully the right match for the child and that the teachers and school will notice anything relevant and will contact the family if they feel the child needs anything. In addition, they may contact the family to say what they can or cannot do for that child given their classroom environment.

So I was curious from the teacher side of things, if you encountered a 1 in 10 yrs child in you class and the parents had NOT come forward, what would you do? Anything? Again this is at very young grades.

Some teachers did already say what they can do to work with younger kids but nobody said whether they would tell the family anything. I am curious whether the pet peeve about families boasting is so large that a teacher might not want to tell the parents when they truly do find a child who really is an outlier.

I have a gifted son, and all of his teachers, even from the very earliest grades (preK), always mentioned this to us during parent-teacher conferences. One even mentioned it earlier. Since this happened for every teacher, I assume it is how it is commonly handled.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:17:08, allow me to congratulate you on your correct use of ellipses....

I thought ellipses should only contain three dots...

In the middle of a sentence ... yes. But if they come at the end of a sentence, you have 3 dots for the ellipses, and then 1 dot for the period, making a total of 4 dots, not 3 or 5 or 6. The PP with the question correctly has 3 dots and a question mark.

For what it's worth, I'm guessing several of us who are arguing with the PG crusader did really well on this sort of thing on the PSATs and are NMSSFs and/or are very gifted, whatever you want that to mean. I'm not the first ellipses poster, or the one who caught "it's." I am an NMSSF, although my parents would never tell me the results of IQ tests. Another poster, again not me, actually identified herself as PG. This means we've lived the gifted thing ourselves, and we have kids who have also lived it. So when argue with a PG Crusader who gets things like this wrong (and believe me, we've been kind, there were lots of other opportunities), we speak from personal experience about advocacy, and what works and what doesn't work for gifted kids.

[Anonymous]

And yeah, that should be "a NMSSF" not "an NMSSF," I should have proofread it....

[Anonymous]

Parents of pg kids be warned, you will never be able to post anything on this site about the pg population without bringing out the k--k--r--a-a-a-z-z-i--i--e--s. They imagine we're all one person, who years ago posted something that left them in a permanent rage.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Parents of pg kids be warned, you will never be able to post anything on this site about the pg population without bringing out the k--k--r--a-a-a-z-z-i--i--e--s. They imagine we're all one person, who years ago posted something that left them in a permanent rage.

OK, I'm going to try one last time to help you see what many of us are objecting to in your behavior. I'm starting to agree with the other poster who said it seems hopeless. But let's try one final time. Because really, many of us have tried to see this thread as an opportunity to put PG discussions on a firmer ground[i], instead of the shaky ground PG discussions always take when you, and one or two others, start doing the things I've enumerated below.

Several posters, including me, are totally fed up and have pointed out the following:
1. The victim mentality that you exhibit in this very post. "No, it's not my fault, it's your fault!"
2. The bad judgment shown by posting links to disturbing blogs, and cutting and pasting horrendously sappy letters, even if this had been a thread about PG kids, which it wasn't originally. I think many of us object to your advocating in this way, because this bad judgment reflects poorly on all advocates for PG kids. Many of us are horrified at the idea of showing that letter to DC's teacher.
3. The frequent grammar and word choice mistakes, which makes some of us wonder exactly what's going on here.
4. The whole Lucy/Charley Brown thing, moving the goalposts of the debate.
5. The way you rewrite history, like, like ... your quote above. Actually, several PG crusaders own the blame for derailing this thread, by turning a teacher peeve into an accusation that teachers hate PG kids, posting links about sad PG kids, and cutting and pasting entire sappy letters ... instead of letting anybody talk about teacher peeves.

[Anonymous]

To the original poster who was following up on a pet peeve by asking how teachers deal with exceptionally gifted kids in lower grades: Yes, teachers tell the parents, usually in the context of parent-teacher conferences. Generally where there is extremely advanced verbal ability it comes as no surprise to a parent; sometimes outstanding mathematical ability is (may be less prone to come up in ordinary day-to-day family interactions).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:To the original poster who was following up on a pet peeve by asking how teachers deal with exceptionally gifted kids in lower grades: Yes, teachers tell the parents, usually in the context of parent-teacher conferences. Generally where there is extremely advanced verbal ability it comes as no surprise to a parent; sometimes outstanding mathematical ability is (may be less prone to come up in ordinary day-to-day family interactions).

Indeed. All my son's teachers told us during parent-teacher conference starting in PK. That would be the natural time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Parents of pg kids be warned, you will never be able to post anything on this site about the pg population without bringing out the k--k--r--a-a-a-z-z-i--i--e--s. They imagine we're all one person, who years ago posted something that left them in a permanent rage.

Oh my, it seems like her head is about to explode.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Parents of pg kids be warned, you will never be able to post anything on this site about the pg population without bringing out the k--k--r--a-a-a-z-z-i--i--e--s. They imagine we're all one person, who years ago posted something that left them in a permanent rage.

Actually, you've brought out a bunch of parents of PG kids, some of whom say they were PG themselves. So obviously we don't hate PG kids, because we have them, or we were them! Plus, we know something about the issue--compared to a handful of PG boosters who can't even punctuate and use big words they don't understand. What we hate is the idiotic approach adopted by a very small number of PG boosters, including the really immature poster above, who make it seem like all parents involved with PG kids are strangely enamored of bizarre blogs and manipulative letters, entitled, and totally self-absorbed.