You’re a parent. Your kids arrives home from school and they seem a little blue. So you ask them if anything happened.
They might immediately tell you, or they might stew on it and tearily tell you at bedtime. Yes, something happened.
Protective instincts kick in and before you know it, you’ve banged out an angry email to the teacher, demanding answers.
The p*ssed off parent email is more common than ever. And Jo Stower, teacher of 36 years, has been on the recieving end of many, and she says please, don’t do it.
“I have a personal rule… I will never respond to that. I’ll wait 24 hours, and then call them and say ‘come in and have an interview’.”
Damn it, I’ve done that more times than I care to remember. Enough times to hang my head in shame.
Why didn’t I just sleep on it and call the next day?
I confessed to Jo that I’m the angry emailer. She says there’s a better way to handle it.
“You can type it up, but don’t press send,” she says.
“Reflect on it. Sleep on it.”
She says teachers always try and consider things from the parents perspective, and they can understand the emotion that goes into protecting your child. But if you push it too far, you’ll be labeled as a ‘chronic complainer’.
Teachers reveal the strangest comments parents have made.
She says when it comes to particularly difficult parents, Jo advises younger teachers not to see the parents by themselves and ask for a fellow staff member to sit in.
“Just to help you because it can be unnerving when someone comes on the attack.” she says.
Jo says it’s important to keep the lines of communication open between parents and teachers, and that it has to work both ways, as a partnership. Her tips on how to advocate for your child were eye-opening for me. And what struck me the most was her lingering compassion for parents and their role in raising school-age-children.
This year I pledge to remember that my children’s teachers and I are in a partnership and I will not send any angry emails. Never ever again.
Jo Stower joins me on The Parent Code podcast with tips on how to have the best parent-teacher relationship ever.
To subscribe to The Parent Code in iTunes go to apple.co/mamamia where you’ll find all of our shows in one place and any books written by the many Mamamia guests.
Top Comments
And then there are the times those complaints are completely justified. I've complained a few times over the years, about teachers who have then verified what my children have told me, complaints around racism, discrimination and even in one case physically harming another student in front of my son. Yes most teachers generally do a wonderful job, but they aren't perfect, and shouldn't automatically be immune to being held to account, purely based on job description alone. That's very arrogant, not to mention in some circumstances dangerous thinking. As for the email, for many busy or working parents an email as the first form of communication makes sense. Playing phone tag trying to talk to a teacher could cause some one really angry to get more worked up. Teachers are more than likely to be busy in class when the parent can call, and most parents would I assume take that into account. And then chances are the parent might also be hard to get a hold of during working hours, which the teacher would have allowed for. An email gets to the teacher when they are able to read it, not at a set time, and vice versa. And a time to talk in person, or over the phone can then be arranged via email.
There's a huge difference between being held to account and being abused via an angry email.
Anyone who has done that needs to realise that we deal with about 140 students every day. We try our best and sometimes we aren't aware of something and/or the student will lie. I have lost count of the amount of times I've seen colleagues in tears because of an angry and often exaggerated exchange. A former colleague with over 30 years of experience had an extremely nasty kid (and yes, sometimes it simply is the kids fault even if they are darlings at home) use bad language aimed at her. She rang the mum and the reply was "Well, we'll see what his side of the story is". Ridiculous.