"You wouldn't understand..."

“You wouldn’t understand,” The parent of one of my students tells me over the phone. I called her to let her know that her son was currently failing my class as he has not turned in an assignment all quarter and was absent more times than present.

The phone call was both of contractual obligation and out of general concern.

I knew a little bit of the student’s background as this student battled severe mental health. I knew this student struggled with organization, time management, and high anxiety levels after procrastination got the best of him. But I have also learned how this student enjoys reading. I also know this student prefers having deep-level conversations over small talk. He appreciates being listened to, something he has admitted that he often doesn’t seem to have the opportunity to receive. I know this student is kind and generally very sweet. He cares about others, maybe more than himself.

The mother over the phone details information that I’ve previously been told by other teachers. Additional details I’m able to infer when the said student is present and discloses with phrases like “My brain doesn’t work” or “I’m much too slow to others.”

The mother provides a variety of reasons – a mixture of reasonable reasons about the student and excuses as a mother. Reasons such as her son having only slept for two hours overnight after sleeping the entire day before or how she had a meeting in the city that she needed to attend and thus could not drive him to his suburban-urban charter school in the other direction. The mother would also play up her anxiety with sending her child into a school after learning a classmate was sick or made a comment she didn’t appreciate and didn’t want her high school or middle school students hearing.

I sat on the phone listening to this mother vent through my entire 75 minutes of planning time. A time that I must also squeeze in other responsibilities such as lesson planning or grading essays for over 100 students, among other tasks required of a teacher in a 2021 classroom. Instead, I became a therapist to this mother – free of charge.

I wanted to help her son be successful. I offered up my lunch to help her son. I offer up my daytime help and after-school help. I even offered up my classroom to allow her high school son to work in my room while I taught a grant-funded academic recovery for middle school students after-school to help them meet grade-level standards after falling behind over a global pandemic of nearly two years.

A plan was established, but it was wholly dependent on her son’s attendance.

When he is present, we make strides. I help him get caught up in all of his classes by calling his teachers and finding out all of their deadlines for his missing work. Many had dates that were quick to come ranging from ASAP to a week. In my effort to help this student with his other classes, I pushed my deadline for my work back behind all the other deadlines.

The student carried a yellow plastic pocket folder with all eight of his classes shoved into it. So, I helped him organize by giving him additional folders to separate his classes. Very quickly, we found some of his missing work.

In a matter of two weeks – ten school days, in which he was only present for six – we got him caught up in almost all of his classes. All that was left was my English class, in which he sat at 14% – one out of five assignments turned in.

His teachers are appreciative of my help. The counselors and his previous teachers are glad that he seems responsive to me. The principal warns me, not of the student but the mother.

We get to work, and suddenly he stops coming to school again.

An email is sent home addressing my worries about his attendance and an update of his work that still needs to be completed for his classes – my class has the longest list. Out of contractual requirements, the principal is cc’ed.

A response from mom articulating how she would not be sending her children to school. She provides various reasons. She then cites how I do not help her son and how she’s not sure if I am the type that can “understand things outside the realm of your school assignments or job duties” before saying she will no longer be communicating with me. She then addresses my cc’ed principal in a manner calling for actions and discipline against me. She begins to paint me as some lousy teacher fabricating stories that I reportedly made her son feel bad about himself.

My principal called me to his office that afternoon. He asks me questions about her email and claims. Some stories she cites on how I’m an awful teacher are uncovered to be twisted and contextual details left out. My principal’s response is simply that he warned me, and he gave me permission to no longer go above and beyond my contractual requirements – something I’m awful at doing.

I read that email frequently, and I think of her son, the student whom I’ve bent over backward for, the student I would go to the end of the world to try to help be successful, the student I’d sacrifice myself for and take a bullet for – the student that is my student. Unable to help anymore. And then I think back to the previous phone conversation I had with her over a month before.

You’re right, ma’am.

I don’t understand.