I love my job more than almost anything, but there are some days that I wish I did something that didn't involve spoiled rotten brats and their rich, influential parents.
Thankfully in my time as a teacher and coach I've had surprisingly few run-ins with parents. Only one of these incidents was bad, and it was really bad (let's just say litigation was threatened, but of course never materialized). So I guess any time I get an e-mail from a parent, I'm automatically on guard for a bad go-round.
Hopefully, this one won't develop into anything, but I'm ticked off about it nonetheless. Allow me to elaborate.
One of the many paid and unpaid jobs I do under the title of "teacher" is coach an athletic team. Seems like it should be an easy job. Tell them what do to, when to do it, and how fast to do it in, and you're golden. But some times, it just doesn't work that way. My team was determined back in the middle of October. The girls were told that they had to commit to the team and pay their team fees by October 11 so the school could pay for pool space and we could order our uniforms. Nineteen girls made the commitment. But this past Thursday morning I opened my e-mail to find a message from a student, asking if it was too late to join the team. We've been practicing for two weeks, we only have two and a half weeks until our first meet, and we've already ordered and received our uniforms. I've turned aside another student who had a similar request just a few days after the deadline. Yes, it is too late. And I e-mailed the student a properly apologetic response to that end.
You'd think that would be the end. If the student were me, and I went to my parents and told them I wanted to play a sport but had missed the deadline, my parents would have said, "That's too bad. Maybe you can try out next year." But parents apparently don't allow their students to suffer defeats and disappointments these days. So this morning, I opened my e-mail to find a message from the student's father.
He asked very earnestly what he, I, and anyone else might do to help get his daughter on the team for the season. He said that he understood there had been a deadline last month that his daughter had missed, but that his daughter had been playing a fall sport which just ended and only now decided that she wanted to play a winter sport. He said he'd be willing to speak to any local, league, or state officials involved in the sport to see if we couldn't get her "passed the deadline".
First of all, in the real world, a deadline is a deadline. If you miss it, you are out of luck. I firmly believe the students need to learn this now so that when they get out into college and have to do some things on their own, they can handle it. She missed the deadline, not by a couple days, but by a friggin' MONTH. What is this guy going to do when the kid misses a credit card payment, sue the company for the late fee? I've already turned down another student who missed the deadline, and she was a lot closer to it than this kid.
Secondly, this girl was a "member" of the team last year in name only. She attended about three practices, didn't work very hard at any of them, didn't compete in any meets, and ordered a pair of sweat pants for which she never paid. Even if I hadn't turned down another student, I can't say I'd go out of my way to be accommodating. Part of the purpose of the deadline was to weed out the ones who aren't really serious about the sport. If she'd really wanted to be on the team, she'd have come to the meetings, turned in her stuff on time, or at least MENTIONED to me before now that she was interested.
The excuse that she was playing another sport doesn't fly with me. I have a girl who was on the same team, only varsity instead of JV (so this other girl had a longer season than the one who wants to join the team now), and she still made the committment on time. I had other girls playing other sports who made the committment on time. And I've got at least three girls participating in club sports outside of school who have managed to find the time to balance the club sport, the school sport, and their studies, and they all committed on time.
Man, when I read this guy's e-mail, I was furious. It was already shaping up to be a bad day: we were missing our morning periods to administer a standardized test, which meant I was losing my two planning periods. I had hoped to attend part of a retreat the seniors had that day, but with the schedule I wasn't going to have the time. I knew the afternoon classes would be worthless, on a Friday afternoon after four hours of standardized testing. And PMS was raging.
First, I was pissed off at the kid for being a spoiled brat. When I was in high school, there was a cheerleader with a license plate frame that read "I owe, I owe, so off to Daddy I go." I have always hated that mentality. Many of our students have it. Since we are a private school with a lot of rich and powerful families (doctors, lawyers, CEOs of the world's largest shipping company, you get the idea), the students all drive nicer cars than most of the faculty (and dress better too). They've got credit cards, expensive cell phones, iPods, $400 purses, Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses, it's just ridiculous. And this kid is just evincing that mentality completely. I told her no, and instead of accepting the disappointment she ran to Daddy to get her way. It reminds me of Veruca Salt in
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I can hear the snooty voice: "Dad-dy, I WANT to be on the team!!"
Then, I was angry at the dad for not taking the opportunity to do his fatherly duty and teach the kid that the world is full of disappointments. Here is the perfect chance to talk to your child about responsibility, about deadlines, and about consequences, thereby making her a better and stronger adult. Nope. Instead, he decided he'd do "anything" to help his baby get her way. If you spoil your child, you won't get anything out of it later, except perhaps to be eaten by lions (sorry, the kids just finished reading Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt" and I'm still in that frame of mind).
And then, I was incredibly offended by this man's arrogance and presumption. He assumed that, even though I had said no to his daughter, I would succumb to his superiority and bend over backwards to accommodate him because he's the FATHER. Big $^%&#*@ whoop. How cocky do you have to be?
So I steamed about it all morning long. Man, I haven't been than pissed in a long time. And my poor kids knew it. They weren't taking the testing very seriously, and I snapped at them. I rarely raise my voice, and I'm never angry in class, so they knew something bad was going down.
I crafted a response with a little help from my friends--our AD, assistant AD, the guidance counselors, the dean, my assistant coach, and several teacher buddies. I was polite, apologetic, understanding, and firm: I said NO. I explained that the deadline had been an entire month ago, that we had already paid per student for our facilities usage and ordered our uniforms (and did not order extras), that I had several students who participated in other sports (including hers) but still made the committment to the team, and that I had already turned away another student and it would not be fair to her or to the girls who DID make the committment if I were to allow his daughter to join the team. I thanked him, suggested a number of local club teams if she really did want to participate in the sport this winter, and said I hoped his daughter would still be interested in the school team next year.
Now, I'm just waiting and holding my breath. I hope this does not become a pissing contest between the parent and the athletic department. I've been involved in one of those before and it wasn't much fun, even though we didn't get sued. I just want the dad to realize that he needs to cut the umbilical cord NOW and start letting his daughter deal with her successes and failures so she'll have that ability when she becomes an adult.
Don't want to get eaten by lions.
