oh Tifff,,,
poor sweet Lily. hug her from me…..

teachers…sigh.as you say.they fall into 2 catergories.either really good or really bad…………….

School was sooo different us oldies went…………….some of the things I had said to me….well they can’t be repeated here.

Tell lily she is wonderful,she is precious………..because she IS Lily and thats the most special thing in the world!!

more hugs

Yes, unfortunately they can make or break you.

(((hugs))) for Lily.

That’s awful. Young people look up to adults, assume that they are wise and know what they’re talking about. To use a word like pathetic shows a lack of empathy that is worrying in a teacher. You are right, they can make or break us depending on what other support networks we have. Well done you for doing something about it. Many parents wouldn’t.

Oh Tiff! HUGE hugs to Lily! I was blessed to have WONDERFUL teachers all through primary and early high school, but I feel teachers today just aren’t the same! Screamers are the norm and therefore my husband and I have decided that home schooling will be the way for our son! I hope Lily is feeling better about herself and the whole situation now and is able to enjoy Easter and her school holidays!

Sending big hugs Lily’s way! Unfortunately this post is so very true,

Teachers seem to either be the wonderful inspiring folk who form young lives or complete nutbars that hate their job and really shouldn’t be there.

You’ve inspired me to write about my own teachers.

Give Lily a hug and tell her that teachers are people too.

What is really pathetic is the teacher who finds it necessary to hide her ineffectiveness and inability behind her obvious talent for bullying a 10 year old.

However, that teacher is lucky. Undeservedly lucky. So very fortunate that that’s not MY child, and that I’m not there and in her face. Because I would be.

I’m halfway round the other side of the world and I can see how special she is. Why is it that someone so close is so blind to who and what she is responsible for?

The only ones who prey on little kids like that, are the pathetic ones (themselves). They need to put others down to lift themselves up. It’s just awful.

Finding that one rare teacher that lifts them up - is truly amazing though. May there be many more of those in her future.

Must agree with you. I had the most AWFUL teachers in primary school, and I hated every moment of that school

That’s so sad and WRONG!!!!!

I think there ARE a lot of horrible teachers out there.

Unfortunately, some experiences that children have borders on emotional abuse. And I think it can have lasting effects.

I think though that parents can counteract the effects by fighting back and comforting their children…just like you did.

That’s just wrong, no other word for it.

I shudder when ET tells me some of the things her teachers said or did to them at school, poking at their self esteem.

It’s just so very very wrong.

You ladies ROCK!! Both of you.
If anyone is pathetic it’s the substitute. It must take someone with incredibly low confidence to have a need to attack 10 year old students.
You know what - The fact that Lily can put together any kind of speech in 5 minutes is outstanding. Go girl.

That is TERRIBLE! Give Lily a big hug for me. That she could even write a speech and deliver it under that type of pressure is amazing. I’d have been crushed under something like that.

When Sarge was in high school he had terrible handwriting. His motor coordination has always been very poor and when the teacher ridiculed him he decided to type all his papers. His teacher told him if he did, she would fail him. He was to handwrite everything and if she couldn’t read it or it wasn’t up to her standard she’d fail him for that too. There was no way he could win. It still makes him furious to remember it.

xoxoxoxo to Lily and you
Flicka

I was over here last night but I was too tired to write a coherent comment..
(((hugs))) to you

The teachers behaviour was UNACCEPTABLE.

When David was in grade three or four, they used to play a game in class where you had a letter from the alphabet. and the kids then had to name a city, a country, an animal etc etc all starting with that letter and whoever got the most points won an icy-pole at recess..

Davids letter was ‘W’ and he said Wandering Albatross for his animal. The teacher laughed at David and said, “There is no such animal”. The parent helper told David he could have a point for being stupid..

Well Tiff, when I found out, I hit the roof I was Fucking Furious. I went and saw the principal who was new that year *sigh* and she wasn’t that interested. So I wrote a ’stern’ letter to the teacher and the principal outlining my concerns and explaining to them just how unprofessional it was to call my son stupid and when I didn’t get a reply from them I wrote to the education department and they took it very seriously indeed. Probably helped that I mentioned words like duty of care, and threw in the latin name for the albatross for good measure..

The point I am trying to make is that as a parent I expect the highest professional standards from anyone involved with my children in a school situation. My primary school days sound remarkably similar to yours Tiff. except I was dealing with fucking sadistic Nuns *shudder*

(((hugs))) again…

my jaw hit the floor reading that

I am sorry that Lily had to experience that. I hope it hasn’t made her reluctant to return to her classroom.
Good on you for speaking to her regular teacher.
Bloody hell, since I left school I have never looked back. Not even for a second.

You did the right thing. The substitute needs to know that her methods are unacceptable. If this is her usual teaching method, I wonder how her regular class gets on?
Lily, you most certainly are NOT pathetic. You are an amazing little girl with a great imagination and a wonderful future ahead of you.

Oh God. Poor Lily. Poor You. Stupid, idiotic, moronic teacher. I hope that she/he either realises the error of her ways or quits teaching.

Toto had a teacher in Grade 4 who was a bastard. Toto was bullied by a specific group of boys, and the teacher always ALWAYS took the “group”’s word over Toto’s. He said that it was more likely that the group were telling the truth because there were more of them.

He also never selected Toto to answer questions when he had his hand up. He would say things like “Let’s hear what ridiculous answer Toto has for us today!” Toto eventually learned not to put his hand up.

One day, one of the group held Toto’s hands behind his back while another punched him in the stomach. Toto went to the teacher, who asked him what he had done to cause that. Toto had kicked the football (his OWN football) to his friend instead of to one of the bullies.

The teacher then said that it was Toto’s fault for antagonising the group.

And he made him sit crying in the hall all that afternoon as punishment.

I went to the principal and we were sent to the school counsellor…. as TOTO had the problem!!! The counsellor was helpful in that she recognised the names of the other bullies and it gave us “evidence” to escalate it. Which we did.

That bloody teacher is teaching Boo this year. I went ballistic when I found out, and had to make an awful decision between moving Boo from all his friends or putting up with this bully of a teacher.

Boo is extremely bright… and this stupid teacher LOVES him. What a pig. He has said to me on at least 4 occasions “Boo is SO different from your other child! He was such a messed up boy”

We had a parent-teacher meeting a couple of weeks ago, which I was dreading, and I was thrilled to be able to tell this stupid teacher that Toto is thriving in his new school and doing really well academically because he has teachers who encourage, support and admire him.

Oh, and when Boo puts his hand up, this teacher always picks him because he knows he will always be right. How demoralising must that be to the other kids in the classroom? Apparently if other kids answer incorrectly, he says things like “Boo, tell them what the correct answer is”. ALL the time.

AAAUUUGGGHGHHHHH

Education degrees alone do not make good teachers. I wish that our children didn’t have to be the guinea pigs. And I wish that our public schools had the power to sack hopeless teachers.

I was lucky, in that I had the sort of parents that were very supportive and a great teacher before the dud came along - he tried that, and learned NEVER to try such things in a small community.

That’s disgusting Tiff. I have a huge thing about teachers being responsible for these little minds and their self esteem (not fully, but they do have a responsibility). I spent the first three years of my eldest daughters schooling talking to the teacher on the first day ASKING them to please encourage her and give her positive reinforcement sometimes, as I didn’t feel the teacher had done the year before (basically she was average student, easily distracted, teacher not interested). Should we REALLY have to ask a teacher how to treat our children?? I wish there were more passionate teachers who really cared about each child as an individual.
I also see children who misbehave and think ‘wouldn’t it be amazing for them if the teacher focused on their good point and pointed it or them out to the rest of the class’. Like you say, they can make or break a child. Sometimes one kind word or statement will change a childs life for the better.
I hope Lily is ok now and knows it’s the teacher who was pathetic, not her.

How horrible! I would think in this day and age, there would be no such psychological infliction happening like that in schools.

I am terrible at confrontation, but sometimes I get just angry enough that I take great pride in knocking those people down. I hope you talk directly to the teacher. She needs to NOT BE TEACHING.

Poor Lily. Kids are bullied from other kids, they don’t need to be bullied by the people who are PAID to teach them what they need to know to grow and flourish in this world.

p.s. I know you don’t have enough going on…but I tagged you for a meme– 5 things you love about being a mum. I hope you don’t hate me for it.

I know you’ve already had twenty comments on this, but I wanted to add my thoughts too. The title of your post sums it all up - teachers can make or break you. Reading this brought back (nasty) memories of my high school maths teacher, who pretty much decided that I was so bad at maths, he shouldn’t have to try to help me. I remember raising my hand in class to ask a question early on in the school year and all he did was look at me, raise an eyebrow and say, “Should I even bother? We’ve only got a year.”

I was crushed and humiliated, and my teacher went back to reading the newspaper and I went on to pretty much fail maths. I still say I’m terrible at maths, but I honestly feel that if I’d had a different introduction to it, with a teacher who actually cared, I might have done better. Hell, I tried hard but it’s hard to keep trying when your questions go unanswered and worse - ridiculed in front of the class of teenagers.

I hope Lily comes to realise that that teacher was out of line and that she is special and not at all pathetic. I also hope that teacher gets what he/she deserves - there is NO way that telling a student her work is pathetic is acceptable. It’s disgusting.

Poor Lily! But also lucky Lily to have a mother who is supportive and ready to help fight the wrongs. This pathetic teacher really should be removed from dealing with students. Who is he/she to be diminishing a childs self esteem?

There are some teachers who make me wonder, why?, why in the world would they go into a profession that not only puts them working with children, but even with people at all? some people just have a personality that would make them much better, day, at doing research in a small locked room completely alone.

There are, also, wonderful teachers. Like you, I remember my teachers from my smallest grades, like the one who turned all the vowels into wonderful ladies, drawings and stories to remember. A middle school teacher who was so fun she let us call her by her first name. And a special high school teacher who lifted up any kid who needed to talk, or who was struggling thru a tough time. And do you know….THAT teacher showed up last week at the funeral home(my dad died). Ive been out of high school nearly 16 yrs, but he saw it in the paper and he came, and that meant so much.
I wish there were a special way to recognize those teachers who make such a difference.

OMG, she told her it was pathetic. I would have seen red too. That is disgraceful. So what ended up happening? I hope the substitute was fired on the spot.

A teacher should never tell any student that they’re pathetic. It’s SO wrong because their self-esteem can be so easily damaged and that damage is so hard to reverse. I hear little anecdotes all the time from people that remember things their teachers told them when they were little - especially not so good things.

[...] across a couple of stories about breastfeeding your doll not being allowed at kindergarten, and a teacher telling one of her pupils she was pathetic. I think both these situations could have been handled a lot better and it’s these situations [...]