It started as a perfectly ordinary day. I got into school just after 7.30am, made a cup of tea, chatted to a couple of people in the staff room then pottered off to my classroom and logged onto my computer. I had just started working through the morning’s email deluge – delete that, file this, print that, forward this – when one particular message caught my eye. It was from Nightmare Parent and it had dropped in to my inbox at 10 minutes to midnight.
It read: “What sort of teacher do you call yourself? I have just put Joe back to bed for the tenth time. He keeps waking up screaming because he can’t do question three on his maths homework. I can’t do anything with him. I’m not getting any sleep. You really must do something about your poor teaching.”
Making a mental note to talk through Joe’s homework with him later that day, I clicked reply, ready to remind this particular parent that the homework wasn’t due for another three days and that we had a homework club at lunchtime to help with any hitches. But before I could construct said email in a courteous form, the admin officer appeared at my door, flustered, still wearing her coat. Mr Nightmare was in reception, irate and demanding to speak to someone in charge because an email vital to his son’s wellbeing had been ignored. Would I mind speaking to him? He was starting to get abusive. Before she could finish speaking, Mr Nightmare appeared in the doorway, having decided that waiting to see if I was available didn’t suit him.
He was certainly angry – apparently because he had received no answer to his midnight email. He steadfastly refused to see reason: I had only just picked up the email at the start of the day and would talk to Joe about the work, which wasn’t due immediately, when he arrived at school. But he was determined that he had a right to have his emails read and answered at his convenience – it wasn’t even about the homework any more. Never mind about my own need for sleep, getting my own children off to school, or getting the day ready for the other 34 children in my class. He left uttering curses, promising to take it to the head, governors, local authority and even the education secretary, issuing judgment to the gathering groups of parents and pupils on the playground about my competency.
This sort of unreasonable behaviour from parents is mercifully rare, and it does at least provide a source of amusement in the staff room. I’m experienced enough to ignore the jibes about my competence and confident enough of my relationship with other parents not to be bothered by what he said about me in the playground. He is a particularly aggressive parent (it isn’t unknown for him to have a go at other parents if he thinks their children are upsetting his son). But it still left me feeling bullied and frustrated that while I was doing the best for his son, he was focusing on expectations that were wildly unrealistic.
This week, reading about what happened to a headteacher who was trying to address homophobic bullying, made me wonder whether it’s time to discuss the meaning of parent partnership with those who are only too aware of their rights, and not the least bit concerned about being courteous, reasonable and realistic. However effective your home-school partnership, there will always be the occasional rude or arrogant parent who, because they went to school, think they understand how to teach, and who have had a bad day at work and need to offload in an email completely unrelated to the source of their irritation. Keeping lines of communication open with these parents is one of the most frustrating parts of the job. Such parents are like nagging toothache – you learn to live with the pain but boy are you glad when it’s gone.
But what of the child, the one who suffered most in all of this? The saddest moment of the day came as Joe shuffled into school looking downcast and miserable. I only had time to say, “Shall we have a look at your maths homework later?” before he burst into inconsolable tears and through heaving sobs begged me to make his dad stop getting so angry when he didn’t understand his homework. And that said it all.
I talked through the homework with him – as is often the case with maths homework, he thought he’d understood something in class, but when he tried to replicate it at home, he found he couldn’t. But there was also the bigger problem of parental expectation. Joe wasn’t worried about the homework, he knew that he could ask for help in school. The root of the problem was a parent with unrealistic expectations of a 10-year-old and no knowledge of how children learn.
We did what we could: we invited dad in to talk through the homework policy, which starts with “stay calm” and “no tears” and talked about how good home-school contact works. While he was appeased, it didn’t solve the root of the problem for the child: his dad was just disappointed that his child wasn’t the maths genius he assumed.
So, parents, please trust us to know what we’re doing. Trust us to know the pace that your child learns at. Trust us to expect your child to achieve the best that they possibly can and to support them in it. Trust us to do all that we can to keep communication clear and open, because teaching and learning are related activities so that’s important. But please also remember that we are people too. We have families. We need time off. And above all, we deserve to be treated with the same respect and courtesy with which we treat you – partnership is a two-way street, Mr Nightmare.
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