The principal thought this was outrageous, though he put it more diplomatically.

He said, 'Six books between us—that's telling her she doesn't know anything about teaching writing.'

We said, 'She doesn't know anything about teaching writing.'

He said, 'This email was written in anger.'

Ed said, 'We are angry.'

I said, 'We are going to stay angry.'

We went on like this for awhile. Ed was in full command of his tone; I was a tad......not in control of my tone.

sigh

(Although, a line like 'We are going to stay angry' is effective whether you're in control of your tone or not.)

The principal gave it one last shot at some point, saying, 'This email sounds as if you wrote it to hurt Mrs. Roth.'

We said, 'We wrote it to hurt Mrs. Roth.'

(These are almost verbatim quotes.)

At some point, it became clear to the principal that we weren't going to be reasonable.

I'd say he did a good job absorbing this information, which was obviously not what he expected.

He made another stab at saying we should have talked to the teacher first; we should meet with her; etc.....

We said there was no reason for us to meet with or speak to this teacher under any circumstances.

At some point he saw that reality clearly, and said, 'So there's no reason to have you sit down at a table with Mrs. Roth.'

Here's where Ed is so amazing, and where I would have folded.

The principal wanted to shift things to emotion. We are angry because our child is upset.

This is true. We are angry because our child upset.

This wasn't a 'dishonest' strategy on the principal's part; it was the way he understood things. He didn't know about the 'You're not retarded' comment, and was visibly upset when he heard it. He didn't know that Christopher has been teased and taunted on a daily basis since Mrs. Roth handed him his public Ds and said 'Are you doing the work at all?' in front of the entire class.

sidebar: Rudbeckia's FERPA link was also helpful.

Mrs. Roth announces grades every day. It's constant. I can cite half the grades of half the kids in that class from memory, and Christopher could tell you all of them.

This was a killer, because the principal several times told us that since we hadn't been present in the class, we couldn't know what was really happening there.

The fact that I can recite the other students' grades instantly neutralizes that argument. I shouldn't be able to recite the other students' grades.

I said that this was a possible FERPA problem. He said it didn't violate FERPA, but it was certainly unprofessional and shouldn't be happening. I said that if it didn't violate FERPA, it was getting close.

This was all to the good. I don't want to make a FERPA case, hire lawyers, etc.

What I needed was simply to know about FERPA, so I could raise the issue.

I'll say that I didn't necessarily have to raise FERPA, since the principal was taking the situation seriously.

Still, what he wanted to do was tell us we'd written an over-the-top email in anger, and ask us to sit down with Mrs. Roth and work things out now that we'd had some time to cool off.

Raising FERPA helped impress upon him the point that we weren't going to be meeting with Mrs. Roth under any circumstances, and we weren't going to be cooling off.

Rudbeckia, thank you



I know. This is long. But I figure.....this is My Personal Record of Events, so....it's long. (Sorry.)


staying on message

Back to Ed.

Once the principal heard the 'You're not retarded' line, things changed. He was visibly distressed to hear that a student in his school was being teased and taunted at lunchtime because of something a teacher had done. That was geniune

It also allowed him to move things to the emotional register, where he felt more comfortable.

I've mentioned several times that in the Middle School there is a chronic your-kids-aren't-as-smart-as-you-think culture, which the people there may not even be aware of.

Our position on Christopher's paper is that it deserves a grade of A.

Mrs. Roth's position is that it deserves a D.

The principal wanted to maneuver us to the point of agreeing that it was a bad paper—or, failing that, simply to drop the issue of the grade altogether, and 'admit' that the 'real' problem was the 'You're not retarded' remark.

I would have gone for that. (Sorry.)

Ed was like a dog with a bone.

He just kept coming back to the grade.

He said, "I would never give a student a grade of D on a paper he wrote and handed in. A grade of D is a failing grade. If I had to give a grade of D, I would provide a full page of constructive feedback explaining why the paper fails the assignment, and I would discuss the paper in private with the student, not in front of the class."

Then he hammered away at the idea that this wasn't a 'D' paper in any case.

Once Ed led the way, I was OK here, too.

I pointed out, a couple of times, that I write feature stories for a living.

Mrs. Roth's biggest beef is that Christopher's paper is short ("awfully short for a major research product" is the way she put it).

I pointed out that a 'feature story' isn't the same thing as a 'persuasive essay' which isn't the same thing as a 'major research product.' [update: A mom told me tonight that one of the girls in the class raised her hand and asked if the feature story and the persuasive essay were the same assignment. Mrs. Roth said, "That's a stupid question."]

Mrs. Roth gave all three labels to the kids when she made the assignment.

I pointed out that, in writing a feature story, the writer constantly has to cut. Constantly.

You have to learn to write short.

(That's the problem with this post; it's too long. Too short is never an issue for a professional.)

This was our only moment of Fractured Logic. The principal said, 'But these are 6th grade kids, we can't compare them to professionals.'

It was apples and oranges again!

A professional has to write short & sweet; a 6th grader should write long & boring, because he's a sixth grader.

If he writes short and sweet, HE FLUNKS!

We went back and forth on this.

The principal said he'd shown the paper to other members of the English department, and they agreed it was bad.

Ed said, 'Did you show it to them with the grade on it?'

The principal said, 'OK, I'll take the grade and the comments off and I won't tell anyone who wrote it or who the teacher is.'

We weren't interested. The paper is good, we said; it deserves an A.

Ultimately, we abandoned this question. It was clear we weren't going to budge; nor would we countenance a Floating, School-wide Assessment Scheme.

At some point the principal as much as said, 'This paper isn't a D.' He didn't say it was an 'A'; he doesn't think it's an A.

What he probably thinks is that it's a 'C,' but that a reasonable teacher, operating under the same grade inflation every other student is given the benefit of, would have given it a B.

I told him—this was my role—that Christopher had worked hard on his paper. That's true. He worked hard on it, and he was proud of what he'd written.

I said, 'This is his work. He tried hard to write a good paper for Mrs. Roth. He's been crying for two weeks.'

Hearing this, the principal looked pained. It was obvious that he perceived the 'D' as a terrible thing to do to a brand-new middle-schooler.

Suppose his paper really was a D?

Suppose it really was awful?

A child who really couldn't write well would never have been treated so harshly.



almost done.....(must pick Christopher up)




the high point

I think the best part of the meeting had to do with Ed's over the top email.

The principal's central goal was to get us to climb down.

We weren't having it, but he kept trying different tacks.

Finally he said to Ed, 'How would you feel if you got an email like that from a parent?'

Ed said, 'I wouldn't get an email like that.'

I almost fell out of my own chair.

The principal looked like he was experiencing the same loss of balance, but—and I admire this—he recovered fast enough to persist.

That was something else I liked. He was thinking on his feet. We weren't doing what he thought we'd do, and we were throwing him curves. He had no idea there was a You're not retarded problem.

He has chops. He was outgunned, seeing as how Ed has a good 20 years on him. But he was game. I like that.

So he tried again. He said, 'What would you do if you got an email like that?'

Ed said, 'I would never get an email like that.'

The principal took the point.

That was a great moment for me. It was another moment where I saw clearly why other people are administrators & I'm not.

Being a good administrator means taking responsibility for things I wouldn't want to take responsibility for, and probably couldn't take responsibility for.

Being a good administrator it means taking responsibility for not getting enraged emails from parents.

It means running a school so smoothly and so competently that things don't reach that point. The staff is doing what they're supposed to do, and the parents trust you to the point that when the are furious, their first move is to pick up the phone and talk.

Not send an email bomb.


'it's on the table'

I can't remember how we finally came to the end of the conversation.

Basically, after we'd gone through the Mrs.-Roth-inspired taunting and teasing Christopher was going through, the nightly crying, the 'I'm stupid, I don't want to go to school,' the 'Stop banging around and making all that noise, you're not retarded.....' all of that.....the principal said something exactly right.

He said, 'Alright. I have to talk to Mrs. Roth. I can't make this decision without hearing her out.'

His tone was direct and simple; this was administrator-to-administrator.

Then he said, without pausing, 'Ordinarily we don't allow students to switch classes, but I can see that's on the table. I'll talk to her today, and I'll call you tomorrow.'

To me, that was amazing.

I was radically not expecting to hear this. I was expecting to get the run-around; I was expecting to go to Pupil Personnel; I was expecting to bring in an Advocate (and in fact had already talked to the Advocate who helped us with Jimmy).

It was a good moment, and it was exactly what he should have said.

We'll see what tomorrow brings.



how to write

So I'm a fan of the principal's, and, barring something unhappy-making tomorrow, I'll remain a fan.

But there were two problems, one of which I understand fairly well, the other of which everyone is already talking about in the Comments thread, concerning gifted kids, and which I don't understand well.

The problem that's making sense to me is the writing problem we have in Irvington schools.

The principal thought Christopher's paper was bad.

Mrs. Roth thought it was awful.

That's a problem, because not only was it not awful, it was good for his age and for what he understood the assignment to be.

Here's an example.

The assignment said that a persuasive essay should Begin with a grabber or hook to get the reader's attention.

Christopher's opening line was: School should be a safe place, right?

One line.

The body of the paper began in the next paragraph.

That's good writing. Number one, it's a 'grabber.' It pulls the reader—especially a kid reader—the 'right' at the end of the sentence makes the essay interactive; it almost commands the reader to start thinking.

The brevity makes it work.

The principal pulled out Christopher's essay and said, 'To be honest with you, I don't like this first sentence. It's not grammatical.'

I didn't remember the first sentence, and I was thinking Christopher had reversed the words 'school' and 'should.'

But he hadn't. The sentence is not only grammatically correct as it stands; it fulfills the assignment. It's a hook.

So......we're in trouble on the Writing Instruction front. Which we already knew. (hey. was that a sentence fragment? i think it was!)

I already know this is a school-wide problem, because it's been happening to the son of a friend of mine. Writing is his particular talent, and he writes well. 'Writes well' means he doesn't write like a 16 year old producing a 5-paragraph essay for the SAT. He's getting clobbered. My friend has been terribly upset about this, because she doesn't have the confidence to know that the teacher is wrong and she's right.

One time she sat in her car and cried after a teacher told her how bad her son's writing was. (I've read his writing. He's good. Trust me.)

The lesson here is simple, of course; Christopher is going to have to do boring, bad writing his teachers will perceive as good.

We can handle that.



Reader's Digest Condensed Version

Here's what an over the top email sounds like:

I've been a teacher and educator for 25 years, and one of the things I learned early on was that you must always highlight the positive aspects of a student's work, even if you have to look hard to find a narrow ray of light.  According to you, there's not even scintilla of quality in Chris's recent piece.  

We beg to differ.  Take the opening sentence: "School should be a safe place, right?"  This seems an excellent way to start.  With just these few words, Chris has nicely set up this essay.  He establishes the reader's expectations, suggesting that the reality of schools may leave those expectations unfulfilled.   Chris goes on to say that there have been shootings in certain schools and then to explain why those shootings might have occurred (bullying, parental abuse, violent video games).  Next, he suggests how the shootings might be stopped and then tersely sums up what he's said.  All this in 175 words!  Not bad for a novice writer with no real instruction under his belt.

The paper deserves an A; your having given it a D would be laughable, except that you have made Chris cry.  You should know, by the way, that Chris wrote this paper entirely on his own; we gave him not an ounce of help.  We're well aware that other parents are writing their kids' papers, but if Chris is to learn to write, he needs to do it himself.