Dear Mrs. Bluth,
I am at my wits end, so much so that I had to restrain myself from wresting the iPad away from my nine-year-old daughter and throwing it on the floor hoping it would break into a cazillion pieces, never again to put my child through the heartache and anxiety that this awful process of learning has brought.
My daughter has special needs, let me just start there. She is an exceptionally bright child who has been diagnosed with Autism, but she is very high functioning. She also deals with bouts of rage when she can’t understand something, or when she is made fun of, and herein lies my problem.
Up until this year, when school was open, she got special help to keep up with her class, her tutors were amazing, compassionate and patient people who, for the most part, gave her the wherewithal to keep on top of her studies to a large degree. My daughter loves to read and has amassed an amazing vocabulary, far above the girls in her class and her thinking and problem solving also surprise us. So when Covid-19 came on and her school went onto Zoom learning, all the progress she was making and the help she was getting stopped and she couldn’t conform.
The Zoom screen goes out more often than it stays on and the little boxes that held her classmates on the screen and the teacher who couldn’t control the class or explain clearly the lessons she taught, only served to confuse and agitate my child to the point where she would yell and scream at the screen to get the teacher’s attention and tell the teacher she doesn’t understand. What does the teacher do? She yells back at my daughter to ‘shut up!’, that if she is so stupid she doesn’t belong in her class! I heard this with my own ears. All the girls were laughing at my child and my heart broke for her.
Mrs. Bluth, this is killing my child, I don’t know what to do anymore. I have kept her off Zoom two days now and tried to work with her, but she misses her friends, such as they are, and she is terrified of the teacher to go back on. What can I do? I’m afraid she’ll fall so far behind that once school goes back to classroom learning, she’ll be too far behind.
Dear Friend,
Right now, I’m as upset as you are! What kind of teacher is allowed to head a classroom if she cannot execute a lesson where all her students understand what they need to know? What kind of teacher would degrade and embarrass her student to the point of making her the ridicule of her classmates and what kind of teacher is so without compassion for a student she knows needs extra attention but has the capability of keeping up with her peers, if only given the chance?
I’m sorry to say, the problem is not all due to the virus, what it has done is bring to the forefront the inefficiency, inability and lack of compassion of this teacher. She should be pulled from the classroom and replaced if she cannot control her class in order to teach them and make sure that at least most, if not all of them, understand what’s going on. As for the foul response and ridicule…..that’s so far over the line that I would fire her or at the very least suspend her until she can get some empathy and compassion counseling.
It is not a parents’ job to teach their child/children what the teacher is supposed to teach them, unless you have willingly chosen to home-school your child. Many parents work from home and cannot stand over one child, let alone three or four children to explain what they are not grasping. So schools that adopt the Zoom method had better educate their teaching staff on how to better control their class and teach the subject matter. No one is going to risk losing their job over this!
I would advise you hire a tutor for your daughter so she can get the one on one help she needs to be able to keep on top of her schoolwork in a tranquil and relaxed environment. It may put a strain on your financial station, however, at least she will be able to absorb her lessons and feel relaxed and receptive to the work. There are quite a few tutors out there who have had the virus and are immune, who would be willing and able to come to your home to tutor her.
There will be an end to this pandemic and life will resume, until then let us not give up our humaneness, our compassion and our readiness to do whatever we can to help our children not fall too far behind where they should be. Let us find a way to stay calm, focused and loving, to encourage them to do their best and if their best is only 75%, it is their 100% and it’s great!
Better times will come, let’s hope that we will have become better along with them, so that we can pick up where we left off, just kinder and gentler and more compassionate than before. Perhaps this is the lesson the virus has come to teach us all!