Oh Yes, THAT’S Going to Help
Posted by Hazel Stone | Filed under Idiot Legislation
Parenting school required, STAT:
A British Columbia father has sued his son’s Grade 2 Montessori teacher claiming that she “purposely and maliciously worked to damage the self-esteem” of his son over such things as failing to encourage the child’s spelling, not sending home a daily homework list and, in one case, displaying an unfinished poem in the school hallway.
Grade 2 = 8 years old or so. Here’s a clue, sir: kids have no self-esteem. Or they should not, at any rate. Incident after incident of falsely-entitled little bastards turning on each other, and their parents, in acts of horrific violence has proven that time and time again.
In a statement of claim first filed in court last fall, Mr. Finkelstein said that his son “suffered and will continue to suffer loss and damages” — including anguish, suffering, humiliation, embarrassment, anxiety, worry and loss of dignity –because Susan Rialp, the boy’s teacher at Selkirk Montessori School, did not make him do his homework or coax his reading and comprehension, and in one case, put his unfinished poem in a hallway for all to see. Ms. Rialp “falsely created and attempted to reinforce artificial differences between his son and his peers and falsely asserted the son exhibits behavioural difficulties,” according to the writ.
This is a guy with a personal grudge against the teacher, simple as that. Here’s another newsflash, buddy…it isn’t the TEACHER who makes the child do the homework, it is YOU. Way to set a “pass the buck” example for your kid there. But that’s ok, you’ve already told him he’s the specialiest boy in the world and he’ll never have to work for anything.
In the lawsuit, Mr. Finkelstein says the teacher also failed to protect the boy when he was bullied by another student, blaming his son instead.
I’m very sure this precious snowflake, so comprehensively enabled by Daddy, is absolutely blameless in the matter. No doubt he’ll grow up to be someone very, very important in civil service.
Tags: death of common sense, non-education
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March 21st, 2008
May the courts quickly find him to be an untreatable asshat and assign a large and burly someone to publicly beat him soundly about the head with a frozen trout (or, this being the NW, a frozen salmon).
March 22nd, 2008
ARGH.
I think I have an idea of what the teacher might be going through.
From August of ’06 to the end of July of last year, I was a reading tutor for AmeriCorps. And while most of my students were awesome (despite a couple of them really struggling for some reason or other), there was one who was a royal little PAIN.
With all my kids but one, it was pretty much the same thing; they’d read through the material I gave them, I stopped them at the minute mark and marked down how many words they’d read, and how many of those were correct. This one kid was…different. He’d refuse to do his assignments at home, for me , my supervisor, or for the teacher, and he was a distraction for the other kids, who happened to be excitable at the best of times. Because of this (and because he was doing so badly with the group’s material that they’d had to move him down to grade 2 material), rather than testing him on his reading rate, I had to work with him on the assignments that his supervisor would have given him. Not help him, of course, but make sure he read the material correctly, etc.
It got to the point where I had to sit there and watch him to make sure he finished it, and even then, he’d sit there and try to get me to do the work for him, and delay delay delay until I had to leave. More often than not, once I had to leave, he took this as a sign that he didn’t have to do the assignment anymore. This, predictably, got so bad that my supervisor told me to set a deadline and give her the paper whether or not he finished it in time (something for which my supervisor or I would have been sued for if the kid’s father were the guy in this story, I’m sure). At least a few times, he didn’t, mostly because he wasted time whining about how unfaiiiir it was that we were timing him.
By the end of the year, I was regularly spending over an hour with him, and the workload had increased to getting him to do all his other work, too. Math, social studies, English, spelling…did I mention I was a READING tutor? This was valuable time that could (and should) have been spent on a child who actually wanted to learn and improve themselves, and instead I was spending it trying to get some uncooperative brat to stop whining and at least try to finish his schoolwork. While he was whining, complaining, willfully disobeying, and occasionally verbally abusing me for making him work instead of letting him fail and take the third grade again.
If anything, I feel sorry for the teacher in this story; given the father’s apparent attitude toward his offspring, and the fact that said offspring shows a similar view of his homework to what the child I just described had, I feel sorry for the teacher just for having to deal with him on a daily basis. Especially since she probably had to deal with a couple dozen others who actually wanted her help at the same time.