Parental Discussions

I try not to let pride get in the way of me doing my job, and I always run emails in delicate situations by others just so I don’t cause waves or make my own someone else life more difficult. There are counsellors, my department chair and members of the administration who have read and ok’ed or altered emails in the past.

But there was one incident last year when I did not fully objectify the situation before sending the email. I got a tepid “if that’s what you want to say…” response from one of my usual checkers and feeling like I got some things of my chest I sent the email. Now the student is a nice guy but his executive functioning is not what you would wish it to be and this leads to difficulties in keeping up, getting his work done and staying focused. Even staying awake. I was unusually sympathetic to this because I feel he was being pushed unreasonably hard at home. There was even whisperings of trying AP subjects in his Junior year. I feel these would have amounted to child abuse. There are many things to celebrate about this guy in class and in extracurricular activities and I feel the excessive pushing was… well, excessive!

Needless to say the response was combative. I got more than I needed to know about divorce, four kids, disease and now a nosy teacher when no nosy teachers were welcome. But what can you do? Our ethos is not to produce overworked, under pressure, men who are dying to go to college because it is far from home. And I may be overstating the case, but I still feel if you fall asleep with the frequency this student did - even in semester exams – and require all the extra time accommodations he did, there should be some evaluation of the set goals so they don’t crush the poor guy. Should I have sent the email? Who knows. Would I today? I don’t know. But if it is not my place as a teacher, who should have a pastoral role as part of the vocation then whose is it?

This not the worst mother son combination I have seen, some come with the phrase, “don’t save for college, save for therapy”. I know you hear men receiving awards thanks their moms for always pushing them, and again maybe I am overstating it, but sometimes I get a different mental picture. A vision of a mother, years from now, wondering why her son has not called her in so long and it makes me sad!    

Thanks