How to deal with bizarre situation with teacher, affecting daughter's grades?

Parents Forum
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While I understand those who say just leave it alone, and why they say that, I think this is mostly the result of the teacher and admin, and their lack of transparency. If they are so certain that the score is correct, why not just show the student and parent what they are asking to see?

Many situations can be resolved with transparency. It seems that it would only take a few minutes to resolve the situation, rather than dragging it out, fueling suspicions, setting up for future hostilities, etc. Given this, I think the OP should continue to seek the information.

And while there are typically no bad intentions, there can be. There was a situation when I was in high school with the college counselor (small private school, only one counselor). She had been the counselor for decades, so admin clearly would trust her word over a student’s word. For a number of years, some students - the ones she didn’t like - would hear from an elite college that their application was incomplete, as the counselor recommendation had not been received.

Well, my class was known as a “bad class”, and sometimes kids made questionable choices. When the recommendation not received happened with my class, the kids took action - they broke into the counselor’s office and went through her desk. There they found the missing recommendations she claimed to have sent.

The whole situation was kept fairly quiet - no punishment for the students and the counselor was allowed to resign (she was around retirement age). Sometimes things happen, and there was no good explanation for why she did this, just that she didn’t like some kids.

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208

I think the OP has gotten all the advice that can be given at this point. The thread will close tomorrow. The OP can start a new thread if there is an update. Today, I would ask the OP to answer questions that helpful users have asked instead of repeating the same points over and over.

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Again, you are missing the point of the original post. This isn’t about a malicious teacher. This is about a malicious teacher AND and malicious school administrator. This isn’t about a parent believing a student over a teacher. This is about a parent wanting to believe so strongly that their child couldn’t get a C that the parent is willing to entertain the notion of a conspiracy of educators who are willing to risk their careers. We are at 200 posts and people have homogenized this conversation and bent the facts into something they can relate to, instead of addressing the literal conspiracy that is the foundation of the original post.

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I share your frustration that your daughter wasn’t shown her results. I think it’s a weird policy/approach to not show it (I understand not letting it leave the room, or having the teacher with her as she views it, so she can’t take photos, etc). I see why that’s unsatisfying.

At the same time, I would also be concerned about how you approach this. Proceeding in this manner is a pretty clear statement of “We don’t trust you” (which is actually the case :joy:), which naturally causes offense. No one likes to be accused of negative things, and assuming there was no error (the C is correct), it’s likely to result in bad feelings towards you/your child, by this teacher and as mentioned likely by other teachers.

I believe your daughter that she thought she did well. But kids sometimes even make silly mistakes, fill in their answers in the wrong line, mislabel things, etc. I don’t think you have to think your daughter is lying to believe it’s possible she got a C. I think in one of the posts above somewhere you said when being quizzed she got the majority right. Even to get a 75/C, you get the majority right. She just might have slipped up on a few more than expected.

I see you are determined to go ahead, and I don’t necessarily blame you for wanting to see with your own (or your daughter’s) eyes. I just hope you speak in a way that does its best to pretend it’s not a trust issue with the teacher. For example, if they do use scantron/technology to grade, perhaps make a reference that implies you are questioning the integrity of the technology, not the integrity of the people (“I heard that sometimes the machines don’t detect the pencil marks well” or something like that).

It’s a pretty giant accusation to think a teacher would change the grades on multiple choice tests downward for a particular ethnicity. I sure hope if you are wrong and the grade is accurate (and/or whatever error may have occurred did not just happen for one ethnicity) that you all feel a lot of remorse for making that accusation even if it was only discussed amongst yourselves and an anonymous board. And if you did talk about it with others, I hope you circle back and clear this teacher’s name (and ask those people to clear the teacher’s name with anyone they make have passed the accusation onto). That would be pretty evil in my book to talk that way about someone and when shown to be wrong, to not correct it with every single person who may have picked up on it.

I genuinely wish you good luck. Because I can’t wish for a teacher to have done such a crazy malicious thing, I hope it turns out there were some silly mistakes and your daughter gets to see that and
is satisfied there was no wrong-doing, and that she aces the rest of the class.

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Well, if they’re the type to bear a grudge and actually act on that ‘grudge’ (eg. try and trash talk kids they teach in front of other teachers, because we’re definitely not considering asking that teacher for any discretionary input) on a perceived slight, ie. just for asking for the grade report, then we have more reason to seek transparency

It’s like, either
(a) Everything was totally above board, fully accurate, no issues whatsoever, then why couldn’t they print the Canvas auto-graded report for us, which shows only the numerical score? Which they verbally reported to my daughter as being reflective of the Canvas auto-graded version anyway. So what can’t they demonstrate that?
→ So they took pains to specifically “mute” the Canvas numerical score for the class on their individual/ own student landing pages, then individually verbally report the score to each student as being the # correct, then refuse to show any evidence to us after we specifically asked for it, when my daughter brought it to our attention what happened. Given all this, even in the chance that they were totally accurate in reporting, ie. they were just ‘busy’ to take 3 seconds to print out the Canvas report for us (but not too ‘busy’ to individually mute the pages and individually verbally report the grades), I don’t see them as legitimately being able to go in front of their colleagues and be able to trash talk the students for asking to see a Canvas printout of their own grades. Plus, if we stand up to it now, even if the other teachers know us as being quite assertive, they will know that we are not to be brushed off. The request wasn’t unreasonable to start with, eg. having the documentation instead of some verbal report

(b) The verbal report is shown to be false. Then we will address the issue by having the grade be corrected, and we will let the other peers in the situation know. In terms of schoolyard politics though, my instinct is unless we have to, we won’t try and force an investigation into everyone’s grades, eg. even if the teacher gave extra points to another demographic, I don’t want other students who benefited this time to get their scores adjusted back down from the investigation as they might treat my daughter differently. The teachers have a standard to adhere to, the students’ behavior to each other is more fluid, eg. what if they exclude my daughter from study groups etc. So if the teacher’s verbal reporting of some scores was shown to be false when compared to the true records, then hopefully they will know they can’t just deflate some students’ scores artificially

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Accusing a teacher of reducing grades for a certain demographic is a huge accusation to make. Is there a history of this with this particular teacher?

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Since the OP is just repeating the same points and not answering questions, I’m closing the thread now. I do not want to see another thread started until there is news to report.

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