She was a large woman and very animated when she came into my office. She was angry and I had learned from experience to allow irate parents to “talk” uninterruptedly until they had said everything on their mind. I gathered from her rant that a teacher had threatened to paddle her son. He had not, but I learned later the teacher had said something about a paddling—perhaps in jest!
Anyway, she reached into her handbag and pulled out a vial of pills and shook them in my face and informed me that she had to be put on medication because she feared her son would be paddled. She asked me if teachers had the right to paddle students; I told her yes, but paddling was a last resort in our school. I also told her that her son’s teacher was very competent and had very good rapport with students and I had never known him to paddle a student! “Did you speak with him?” I asked. She had not.
She was not satisfied with her visit to my office. She went directly to the School District’s Chief Administrator’s Office. Apparently not satisfied with comments he made to her, (which evidently were essentially the same as mine) she went to the County Superintendent’s Office. Perhaps she had not been taking the medication she showed me because she was extremely vocal in the County Superintendent’s Office.
After she had exhausted her pent up emotions she asked him: “Tell me, do you believe that schools should be allowed to use capital punishment?” His answer was quick and to the point, “Hell no lady, but if you mean corporal punishment, the answer is yes.” She left in a hurry!
I had one other brief encounter with this same mother when she accused the boy’s third grade teacher of not knowing anything in mathematics! She went on to tell me her son’s teacher was teaching the students to divide a small number by a large number. She proceeded to inform me that when she was in school you always divided the small number into the big number “Everyone knows you cannot divide a small number by a large one,” she told me with great emphasis! She and I had a brief discussion of fractions—converting common fractions to decimal fractions. I suspect her son’s teacher may have been trying to explain how one would divide one pie into three parts—and perhaps elaborated on how one might divide a small numerator by a larger denominator. She left; convinced, I’m certain, that the principal knew nothing about mathematics, either!
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