We’ve Heard Some Disturbing Rumors About Our Kid’s Awful Teacher. I’m Not Sure Where to Go From Here.

Care and Feeding I can’t let this go on another year. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here. Dear Care and Feeding, My child, “Jamie,” is enrolled in a private school. We enrolled them in kindergarten at this school because we felt that the public education in our area was not up to acceptable standards and we were unable to move to a new district. Kindergarten through 2nd grade was a work in progress after COVID home preschool, and then (finally) they had a fantastic year in 3rd. Then the floodgates of hell opened thanks to the worst teacher ever. Our bright and energetic kid shut down, transforming during the school year and ending up with poor grades due to laziness, disengagement, and lying. We feel that the teacher was at least partly to blame, since there was no communication with us and the teacher bullied Jamie and others (according to Jamie) and has a history of being disliked by students. Jamie is now entering 5th grade. Since this is a small school, there is a good chance the horrible teacher will be teaching core coursework at the standard or higher level this year and beyond. We can press the school to place Jamie only in classes this teacher isn’t teaching; however, those classes are most likely to be at the remedial level. Standard or high are levels Jamie is comfortable in (they are very bright and test within the 90th percentile). Is it better to remove Jamie from classes this teacher will teach—thus potentially opening them up to unchallenging classes in which they’d be bored—or expose them again to a bad teacher? Or do we resign ourselves to a substandard local school and start house-hunting? —Problematic Private Dear Problematic, I feel for you. I remember very well, all these years later, struggling with decisions about school for my daughter. Lots of parents do. It’s hard to advise you without more information. For example: What is it about the public school that’s “substandard”? Is the only metric you’re relying on test scores? (They don’t give the whole picture.) Have you visited classrooms and observed? I eliminated the elementary schools we were zoned for after visits to them. In one kindergarten class, I witnessed the teacher screaming at the children (and I thought: If she does this with a visitor present, what must she be like when she’s not being observed?); in another, the children were kept busy with Disney cartoons. The public school we ended up going with was a godsend: an alternative school in a neighborhood far from ours, in which the arts were incorporated throughout the curriculum. But it was still a public school in an underserved system, and many—most—of the children had difficult circumstances at home. My husband and I each volunteered in the classroom one full day a week for two years because we were needed: There were so many kids in a single class, it was impossible for the (excellent) teachers to engage fully with all of them. And this was a success story! Our daughter thrived at her public school. But when the district suddenly pulled the plug on the arts curriculum, replacing the school’s director (and founder), taking the school in an entirely different direction, it began quickly to fall apart. That was when I did what you did: I put my child in a small private school. What little faith I had in our town’s public schools had evaporated. I tell you this long story because I eventually found myself where you are now, except multiplied by a factor of at least three (horrible teachers). I waited much too long to remove my child from that school, even though my every instinct was to take her out of it and take my chances on another public school. (And this is the tl;dr version! I tell the whole messy tale in all its details in my 2005 book, The Middle of Everything.) Other missing pieces of information make it hard to advise you, too. Have you done due diligence on Jamie’s teacher? (You mention Jamie’s account, and a sense that other students have disliked this teacher.) Have you called for a meeting, talked through what happened, gotten a sense yourself of who the teacher is and how responsible they are for Jamie’s rough year? Have you talked to other parents? The school’s director or principal? In general, though, I’d say that 1) you do want a 5th grader to be challenged and interested in their coursework, so putting them in “remedial” classes would be a mistake, and that 2) if this teacher is a bully, you want to make sure they never get anywhere near your child again (I’d also make sure the school’s administration and other parents are aware of the teacher’s behavior). Since #1 and #2 appear to contradict each other in this situation, you may have no choice but to pull Jamie out of their school—again, as I wish I had done, as early as 3rd grade. Give your local public schools a chance. Who knows? It might turn out to be a good experience for Jamie, as it ultimately did for my daughter when she returned to public school. Please keep questions short (<150 words), and don‘t submit the same question to multiple columns. We are unable to edit or remove questions after publication. Use pseudonyms to maintain anonymity. Your submission may be used in other Slate advice columns and may be edited for publication. Dear Care and Feeding, When is a good age to teach a little one about pronouns and the existence of transgender people? I’m a younger parent (I won’t specify my age for privacy purposes) and I’m very supportive of the LGBT community. My child is under 10 (but not younger than 7). I don’t want to explain too early (if that makes sense) or too late. She is already very accepting of same-sex relationships: She has an uncle who has a husband, and her father and I’ve been making sure to encourage her to be open and accepting towards other people regardless of race, gender, sexuality, or nationality. But this one stumps me. —Anonymom Dear Anonymom, It’s never too early to teach a child that people come in all sizes, shapes, skin colors, abilities, sexualities, nationalities, and ethnicities and that gender doesn’t necessarily align with the body parts one was born with. Adults who’ve been raised to think of gender as a strict binary that is always tied to body parts have a harder time understanding the latter than children do. In fact, the earlier you introduce a child to this basic tenet, the better served that child will be to live in the world in a nonjudgmental, open-hearted, open-minded, generous, and loving way.Small children’s minds are extraordinarily plastic—flexible, that is, and open to all information that comes their way. If you want to raise children who are accepting and open, not to mention at home in their own skin, then don’t delay this conversation any longer than you already have. If you need books to help you with it, try It Feels Good to be Yourself. If your child is too old for that (picture) book, here are some other suggestions, from the New York Public Library. Ever Gotten a Call From Human Resources? Laura Helmuth and Doree Shafrir want to hear about it—and help you navigate your problems at work. Does your colleague constantly bug you after hours? Has an ill-advised work romance gone awry? Ask us your question here! Dear Care and Feeding, My daughter “Sally” has just turned 10. She’s mildly autistic, but her school doesn’t consider this a disability that’s at a level requiring assistance. Mostly, the autism shows up in the way she gets fixated on her interests and on doing whatever she’s doing very well, and in her failure to read social cues. She’s a kind and well-behaved child, but she reacts to advice or instruction in a way that is really self-destructive. I’ll give you some examples of what I mean because it’s hard to sum up. The other evening, she was building a brand-new Lego set on the floor in the family room, and when I told her it was time for dinner, instead of just leaving it to return to later, she scooped all the pieces and the half-built set and dumped them in the big Lego tub. Then she got upset because she couldn’t finish the set, since it was all mixed in with the regular Legos now. I asked her why she did that and she said it was because I told her to stop playing. I didn’t tell her to destroy the thing she working on! Another example: We were having a picnic and she was scooping out fruit salad. Someone said, “Make sure to put the lid back on, there are wasps.” She scraped all the fruit off her plate and back into the fruit salad bowl. Again, that’s not what she was told to do! And she couldn’t tell us why she did it. She just said, “Now I can’t have fruit salad.” She seems to always choose to do the thing that makes her unhappy. She also takes constructive advice badly. Example: The whole family is in an archery club. Today the coach noticed she was positioning her fletching wrong on a shot, and it was like a switch flipped and her whole day was ruined. For the rest of the day, she would get two 9s and an 8, and obsess over the 8 as proof that she was doing badly. Normally, she’d be happy with that score. But because she got advice about positioning, she became very self-critical and assumed she was doing everything wrong. This happens all the time. She also cries easily and often. She’s very likely to give up rather than trying, but only after someone tries to help her. I don’t know what to do, because if you try to talk to her about it, she takes that as further criticism and it makes her more upset. My tone of voice doesn’t matter either: She reacts the same way to speaking kindly as to a scolding. Sometimes I wonder if it would be better to not try to help her at all, but that feels cruel. I don’t know if these are autism problems or tween problems. None of our friends have experienced anything like this with their kids of the same age. At worst, they get a tween eye-roll. Our doctor tried to help us apply for further autism support, but she was turned down. What do I do? —Mom at Sea Dear Mom at Sea, Whether these are “autism problems” (some of what’s going on with her may be directly related to autism, yes), tween problems (ditto the “some”), and/or matters of temperament unrelated to either of the above (again, ditto), there are some things you can do to help her, and to help steer her away from behaviors that are so frustrating to you. For starters: Since you know she takes everything literally, interpreting common instructions in a way that doesn’t include what seem to you to be the commonsense implications of those instructions (for example, that she put the lid back on the fruit salad bowl only after she serves herself from it), why not start practicing giving her instructions in a way that she’ll understand? To wit: “It’s dinnertime, Sally. I need you to leave your Lego structure exactly as it is so that you can come back to it after dinner and finish putting it together. Now, please come to the table for dinner.” And if someone at a picnic says, “Make sure you put the lid back on so that wasps don’t get in,” you can quickly add, “After you finish serving yourself.” And perhaps, if you phrase things this way often enough, and she responds in the way everyone present considers appropriate, others will get the message and phrase things more carefully too. I would consider this thoughtfulness in speech to be an accommodation—in other words, “autism support.” And it’s worth talking to her teacher about, too, even if the school doesn’t consider Sally to have “enough” autism to require assistance. And if she takes “constructive advice” badly, I would back off (and ask the archery coach, her teacher, and others in a position to offer advice) the constructive criticism. Some highly sensitive people don’t metabolize criticism as readily and successfully as other people do, especially when they are children. I’m not suggesting that you (and everyone else) give up on helping her get better at the things she does, and wants to get better at (or needs to get better at, for her own safety or future goals); only that you (all) ease up on it for a while and see how she does. It can be reintroduced slowly, over time—and judiciously. You connect her crying easily and often to her distress when criticized, too. So perhaps by easing up on her, you’ll see an added benefit: She won’t have so many reasons to cry. And I’ll add that both her unwillingness—or inability—to take correction and the frequent tears are pretty typical for a sensitive kid of this age. But honestly, given the diagnosis of “mild” autism, I’m not sure of the value of trying to assign cause to each of the behaviors that trouble you. Instead, see what you can do to adjust to who she is, and see if this makes a difference in how she is. I’m betting it will. There’s a difference between withholding help when she asks for it (you’re right, that would be cruel—it would be a parenting fail, too) and offering unsolicited criticism, whether it’s meant kindly and spoken in a sweet voice or issued as a scolding. And even if she asks for help, when you give it, give only what she’s asked for—don’t make it more global. Pay attention to the specific thing she’s asking for and stop there. One more thing: I think it will help too if you can reframe your thinking about Sally’s “choices.” Do you truly believe that your supersensitive 10-year-old with autism chooses (“always”!) to do “the thing that makes her unhappy”? That she considers her options (hmm, do I leave these Legos as they are and come back to work on this project after dinner or do I destroy it?) and then picks the one she knows will hurt her? I think your frustration may be overshadowing your compassion for her, and I’m hoping that if—instead of hoping she’ll change—you make changes to accommodate her needs, that cloud of frustration will lift. This will make things better for both of you. —Michelle More Advice From Slate My son is 2 years and 5 months, which I know is on the early side for this, but he grasps the general concept of the potty and is intrigued by it. He’s also the youngest in his class, and he observes slightly older kids using the potty like champs and seeks to emulate them. Perhaps most importantly, he knows, as his sister did before him, that a gummy bear awaits him if he potties successfully. Here’s where we are: Night after night after night, he sits happily on the potty for a good long while, eventually climbs down, then gets into the bath and, standing up, calmly, and with a sense of great purpose, pees in his bath. Advice Family Parenting