In many places nowadays, schools are tending toward shielding themselves from parents supervising the schools’ activities: general and specific policies, teachers’ behaviors, etc., including enabling children in empowering gender dysphoria, punishing children for being. . . normal, and engaging in psychological evaluations and labeling that pubschools are unqualified to do (not that a growing number of credentialed p-sychs are not disqualifying themselves, but that’s another issue).
But schools have always, well, as long as I’ve been alive, at least, had problems with teachers or admins arrogating powers unto themselves that they are not qualified to wield.
Exhibit A: 9th Grade. I was sent to thee principal’s office for disrupting my English class. what was my actual offense? I had finished an in class written assignment FAR too quickly, because I had read the textbooks during the first week of class, and was able to (correctly) finish the assignment without re-reading thee assigned material from the lit book. Unacceptable! I was instead supposed to wear Harrison Bergeron’s handicaps and plod along with thee rest of the cud-chewers.
Fortunately, my parents were called, and the teacher ended up allowing me to work at a reasonable (for me) pace for the rest of the year, and the following years I was not placed with the cud-chewers. (When a similar situation cropped up in my second year of Spanish, that was nipped in the bud before it became a problem. History helped in that case.)
Parental engagement–though not the “parental Karens” kind–can be a positive force for good.
(N.B. I was placed in cud-chewer, A.K.A. “normal,” classes in 9th grade because we had moved from out of state, and the new district just did not want to credit past performance. This also resulted in a biology class that was a lower level review of my 7th grade bio class, notwithstanding the fact that my 8th grade human anatomy class surpassed even that. Nowadays, I shudder to think what might happen.)
BTW, I was NOT, and never have been, a model student, at least not in the institutional frame. I am like our Aussie Lap Puppy in one regard: I learn what interests me. Oh, if a compelling reason presents itself, I can and do learn things that are otherwise not interesting to me, but the inducement in those cases has to be pretty convincing. ¯\_(?)_/¯ For example: I never saw a convincing reason to learn how to use a keyboard until I ran across a piece of software that enabled engraver-level composition, transcription, and arranging of music playing between my ears. Finally, a motivation.
