"Oh! My little sweetums isn't going to get into Harvard* because of you!" Teaching "the entitled."
"Oh! My little sweetums isn't going to get into Harvard* because of you!"
*Insert any college or university here.
I heard this all the time when I had Parent/Teacher conferences because 'little sweetums' had been punished or had not gotten an A+++++++++++++++.
I remember one meeting which was held because I had given 2 students ZEROES for cheating. One was showing the other his answers. It wasn't even close, and they both admitted it. The parents of the 'show-er' didn't think he was cheating. I never heard from the parents of the 'show-ee.'
They refused to believe it was cheating. I refused to debate the semantics of the situation. They could call it 'out of the goodness of his hearting' for all I cared. He got a ZERO. This didn't compute in their universe because ZERO was a temperature or a nickname for a Japanese plane in WWII, but not a grade.
I was told ad nauseum about what cheating was and wasn't. I was also told I would be held responsible for his failure to get into Harvard or Oxford or whatever ultra-elite school that was the flavor of the month. I told them he was in the NINTH grade and that it was the FIRST month of the school year. He had plenty of time to pull the grade up and make an A. He wasn't doomed, and I didn't require ZERO to be written on his forehead in indelible red magic marker like some educational version of Hester Prynne. They wanted to know if she had gotten a ZERO also.(facepalm ran through my mind)
This was the opening of a new play at Hawthorne High School. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was a major character in this offering. I was hounded for weeks about giving the poor, bedraggled little person a retest. His counselor told me that they did that all the time at the middle school he came from. She didn't agree with it, but that's where a lot of it started.
I finally got so fed up with the almost daily conferences with somebody about it that I told the principal it had better stop. I gave her my written resignation and said that I was leaving if I heard one more word about it. I told her that I didn't have another job, but I thought that blowing grass clippings off medians was preferable to this torture. She said to keep teaching and she would take care of it. I thought she should be able to because she was responsible for 99% of it.
I wasn't sure what the parents thought. I wasn't going to send out a form letter to every school about the incident so the child wouldn't be accepted. Nor did I keep a calendar to remind me in 4 years to find out where he was applying so I could haunt the committee that considered possible enrollees.
These types of children were doomed IMHO. The parents refused to let any type of punishment be given because it would spoil the record of their child. I thought it was better to let them suffer the consequences now which were minor rather than bail them out all the time. They wouldn't be able to bail them out of life later on.
When this topic came up as it inevitably did when parents were running interference, I always wanted to tell them to save up because if they weren't using that cash for Harvard later, they might be using it to post a bond somewhere.
(I know people will now jump in to tell me how their child was unfairly treated in some situation. I'm not against a parent coming to the defense of a child when necessary. I'm dealing with kids who are never wrong no matter what.)
= new reply since forum marked as read
Or maybe call it safe failure
Or even targeted laziness.
I strongly believe in letting kids make mistakes early and often so they learn consequences happen when the stakes are still small.
You did that kid a real favor teaching him a valuable lesson in 9th grade rather than college where he could have been expelled or as an adult where jail time is the real life consequence for fraud.
Better, however, would have been to learn in middle or elementary school where he might have missed recess.
My son is 17 but he learned that he had better be in real trouble before mom bailed him out. He also is learning that most mistakes can be fixed, but some can't and he'd better learn the difference. For example, when his ride home last Saturday night was too impared to drive, he called home. Natural consequence was I was a bit grumpy the next day, but I took a nap and was my normal charming self by dinner. 
. Plus he had to help his friend pick up his car from the party house at 6 am so he didn't get much sleep. It was inconvenient enough for him that I Didn't feel the need to say much.
Natural consequence of taking the chance that his friend could have gotten home safely could have been much worse and there's no helecoptering parent in the universe who can fix a fatality. Over the years, he had to screw up enough on the small stuff to learn how to handle a real decision without mom there to guide him when it was actually kind of a big deal.
You see, I don't just try to teach my kids natural life conseqeuenes happen because I'm too lazy to fly in to the rescue. I do it because they need to really learn these things.
I like teachers like you. You make my job easier and understand that we are both sometimes teaching more than algebra. Well done!
That would be George, warmonger, *. And we all know how well upbringing worked. 
