Restraint

There are times that my restraint amazes me.  Not because it's particularly strong.  Quite the opposite.  I have no filter when it comes it saying things, I'm very opinionated and share my opinions often and am pretty hot tempered.  The only thing I do have going for me is that on rare occasions I can keep my temper from completely blowing up and give myself sometime to regroup and get my ducks in a row.  Don't think for a second that I'm going to back off.  That almost never happens.  What I will do is make sure that I have all my i's dotted and t's crossed.  Then I'm going after whomever and they have little choice but to grab their ankles and sing along.  This is especially true when it comes to protecting Princess Bear (PB).  She's my one and only child and is entirely too trusting.  Therefore Mama Bear has to stay vigilant. 

Once again my daughters teacher decided to play screw around.  She didn't like it when she got called on the carpet for screwing up yet again at the IEP in October.   Frankly the women is dumb as a box of rocks. She was dumb enough that in front of the Principal and PB's coordinator to say that she is still only teaching one reading level.  This has been a problem since last year and why they were able to get another teacher since I raised a stink back then.  SO, here we are 7 months after the initial meeting but with a new, more involved principal and she makes this revelation.  Things were promptly put into play to have PB tested and put into an appropriate reading group.  Things should have been peachy keen.  One small problem though.  Progress reports came home yesterday.  PB went from an A in Differentiated Instruction (DI) to a D.  First problem here is that I was not notified that my child had dropped 4 letter grades.  NOT ok.  Especially if you consider that the teacher now has to send home notes every day to let me know what PB has been working on and how she is doing.  If there is a significant drop like that I better be finding out well before the next progress report or report card.  Now comes the real kicker.  The assignments that were done in DI are very subjective reading and writing assignments.  In other words a very easy way for a teacher, a dumb teacher albeit, to give a student a bad grade if said teacher is upset with the students mother because the mom called the teacher on the carpet in front of their boss.  So I walk into school and PB is frantic because she has a D and knows that in our house there is never a good reason to have a D.  I look at the teacher and ask what happened and why wasn't I notified.  She tried blaming it on the new DI teacher and wouldn't even stop to discuss it with me.  Big mistake.  I was on the phone calling PB's coordinator before we even got out of the school parking lot.

The school that the coordinators office is in is at PB's old school which is a block away from our house.  I gave it an hour and decided to just go to the office.  The coordinator knew that I was very unhappy from the time I sat down.  She pulled up PB's grades and low and behold the first 2 assignments after that IEP meeting were F's.  PB had never received an F before. Do you watch NCIS?  I'll go with Gibbs rule on there is no such thing as coincidence.  All in all I spent about 2 hours with the coordinator going over ALL the problems we've been having.  The coordinator is has flat out said that she knows this isn't a good situation and that there are issues with this teacher.  I guess the good part is that she's retiring after this year.  The bad part is that she sucks as a teacher and this is the second year that PB has lost out on what she could have learned if she had a good teacher.  The coordinator did tell me that I would be fully within my right to go to the Superintendent of Special Education as well as the Coordinator of Special Education.  I did mention that I'm a bit leery since there is now a direct correlation between this teacher being called out as screwing up and my daughter's grades suffering.   I'm not entirely sure but I think at this point I'm going to let the Principal and coordinator take care of this the best they can.  I did say if there were other complaints and there was any chance the teacher could be removed from the classroom immediately for the remainder of the year that I would certainly fly this up the flagpole as high as it needed to go.  I'm still beyond livid and frankly am amazed that I haven't flat out told the teacher what a lazy piece of shit I think she is.  I wonder if there's a Hallmark card for that?