Reply to Teachers, how do you tactfully refuse to write a recommendation letter?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If the student is not academically stellar but is a kind person who tried his/her hardest, I will write a positive letter focusing on his/her good qualities, and I will give specific examples to show that I know the student well and put time and care into the letter.  I have had several boarding schools to whom I wrote letters of rec tell me that the letter I wrote was one of the best they’ve seen, and those letters by no means indicated that the child was an academic superstar.

But if the student was average or below average, didn’t try, and/or had a poor attitude, I will tell him or her that if they want me to write it, I will say XYZ.  Then I ask if he/she really wants me to write that letter.  They rarely do.

If a student is academically strong and his/her parents have ever been disrespectful to me or tried to go over my head in any way, I will not write the letter and nothing will change that.  I don’t tell the student why in this case, I just say that I think another teacher might do a better job and I cannot write the letter.

I will not write letters of rec for any student I have witnessed bullying a classmate.  No exceptions here.  I have told kids that I can’t write a letter of rec for them because the quality that stands out most in them to me is that they are mean to others.  One such student pleaded, “Yeah, but you’re a teacher and you are just supposed to focus on my grades.”  I told him 
I would be happy to write a letter affirming that he is one of the most academically gifted students I have ever known, and that he routinely mocked a wheelchair bound classmate and expressed misogynistic and racist views in class.  He said he still wanted the letter of rec from me, so I wrote it and said all of this.[/quote]

And now we know why there is that one red x on the upper right of Scattergrams. Student sounds horrid.[/quote]

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