Aren’t most parent teacher conferences (at public schools anyway) optional? The running joke with my teacher friends is that in general: the parents of every kid with an A show up- and you chat about how great their kid is (enjoyable, but not best use of time) and the parents of kids who are really struggling rarely come. I like conferences b/c it is an opportunity to get to know parents, talk about big picture of class etc- but will freely admit that change (for students who need it) rarely comes from that venue
Have your son tell the teacher that this year he is identifying as a female.
Problem solved.
You can’t make parents attend conferences- at any grade. My HS eons ago did not offer them at the HS level as I recall. Is it common for HS to have them? One can always schedule a meeting but having all teachers available some afternoons/evenings to talk with any and all parents was not in my prior experience. In HS most kids do not want their parents to have any contact with teachers- I did so for two in all four years (and the A class was just a casual drop in during conference time). Oops, then there was the AP teacher’s contact with us to inform us she was breaking her rule that any student who did not turn in the term paper on time automatically failed- son never told us anything about it- and this gifted senior kid (who had attempted far too much, got an extension to revise approach…) needed this class to graduate- he got a ride to hand it in from mom by the final deadline and got a C instead of the A he otherwise would have earned.
Oh, the tales we parents can tell. I have a lot more I could bore people with. Our parenting ruined our child for life. Now he’ll never get the Nobel prize in Chemistry or Medicine, or…
PS- one of the hardest parenting things we learn is that our child, no matter how great, isn’t and that no matter how hard we try, how much we do, we won’t do everything we should have. The time comes to let go and see that our child has made it to adulthood with good childhood experiences and gets to lead his/her own life.
I have taught middle and high school (at different times) for 25 years- and a parent for 19. While I have certainly learned and evolved as an educator with time- my PERSPECTIVE changed the most during the time my own child progressed through middle and high school (I happened to be teaching MS when she was in MS, and switched back to HS when she was in 8th grade, so have been teaching HS all during her HS years). Some parents have been inspirations, some cautionary (and I have literally shifted parenting technique b/c I don’t want to be like “so and so”)
Trying to figure out what to do when your kid has a problem with a teacher isn’t easy. Still, there are times when you can discern that the problem lies with the teacher, and then you have to figure out if it’s a big problem or a small problem. Our experience was that if it was a big problem, the only thing that would do any good was to get your kid out of that class. We were lucky to be able to do this when it was clearly necessary.
In my own school district, what eventually happened to bad teachers was that they ended up teaching the very weakest (and usually poorest) students, whose parents never complained.
That happens in my district too- the sad part being that those are the kids who need strong teachers the most.
My D had a huge gender bias issue with an AP teacher when she was in HS. The teacher had a chauvinistic attitude and actually told the girls in class that they needed to “give it” to their boyfriends and (later) husbands often or else they would be the reason for the failed relationship. Apparently this teacher didn’t agree with D’s writings and gave her an F on her first paper. D never made a B on a a paper before, let alone an F. He allowed her to rewrite it and gave her a C on the rewrite. There was nothing wrong with the paper with grammar and organization. He just didn’t like what she had to say about his topics. D tried talking to him a few times about what she could do to improve her grade, but he had nothing to offer other than his male idealistic attitude. He never gave the tests back either (100 questions every other week). He veered off topic during every class and talked only about himself. I know his wife and if she knew the things he was telling his classes she probably would have been mortified.
We finally had to pull the parent card (we are both teachers) and spoke with a counselor and had her drop the class with a WP. We didn’t want that on her transcript, but staying in the class all year would have been fruitless and detrimental to D’s GPA. She took the class in college and got an A+. I am doing everything in my power to make sure my S doesn’t get this same teacher.