I used to be so on the side of teachers until my kids started going to school.
The lack of education given my daughter has really been amazing. My other 2 kids are gifted, and they can easily pick up things.
However, my one daughter has brain damage. Everything is hard work for her. What has amazed me is that when I would tell the schools that she had a problem, they ignored me.
I remember telling them over and over that it seemed like she had a hearing problem because we were always repeating things to her. Her hearing was tested by an audiologist, and we knew that she could hear, but something else was going on.
She also has speech problems, and I told them that she had a hard time finding the words to say to things I knew she could pronounce. They ignored me on that.
In 3rd grade, I finally asked for an independent evaluation. We found out my daughter has horrible auditory memory. She can’t remember things you tell her. She was 9 years old by the time we figured this out. The schools had the tests for this, but they never tested her.
Then we found out that she has word finding problems (like a stroke victim).
Even after we found out these problems, the schools didn’t want to remediate the problems.
For 4th grade, we placed her in private school with a reading tutor, and private speech therapy. She’s making good progress now. When I bring up a problem, everyone now tries to figure out how to help her. Even if they can’t, they suggest who I should take her to.
And on the other side, I had a student in 4th grade one year who couldn’t read, write his own name, NOTHING. I checked his records, he had been attending the school since pre-k and had NEVER been tested for problems. He was considered a behavior problem and I was told by some of his previous teachers to “forget about him, he’s a waste of time, won’t amount to anything”...of course, them’s fighting words to me! I immediately went to the SpEd supervisor and got the process started for him to be tested...turns out he was dyslexic and it had never been caught. Kid couldn’t read, but he could draw like nobody’s business, and that’s how I taught him to read and write—he’d draw pictures (he loved military tanks, aircraft, etc and drew great pics of them) and we’d work on his writing to describe them. He learned how to go to the library and research military things, then he’d write basic reports and present them to the class. Pretty much all behavior problems ceased, and one of my best memories of him is that he was interested in science and wanted to meet Dr. Robert Ballard who was giving a speech in Dallas, and the teachers were given free tickets. I took him with me and afterward he got to meet Dr. Ballard and shake his hand and talk to him, which delighted the kid to no end. :*) Said he wanted to be a scientist after that...I learned years later that he *did* graduate and got a scholarship to the local junior college, so hopefully somewhere he’s a functioning adult who could have turned out very differently and badly if things hadn’t changed for him.
For every bad story about teachers, there are good stories too. I would just like to respectfully ask people to remember that instead of lumping everyone all together.