Principal at School Says I Cannot Email Other Parents About Class Related Things!

And any self respecting human would throw a monkey wrench right into the middle of that bullshit.

Throw your weight against the wheels of tyranny and RESIST, OP!!

That's what I thought! They really have no right to do something like that! Thank you for replying!

Get your child out of school! How can you send them to public schools??!?!

Resistance is victory!

Endurance wins wars!!

No matter how small that war may be.

You can tell them that you AND your child both have your rights to freedom of speech regardless of what the school may think or see. Some schools think that the kids and even parents cant speak their minds because it's in the school rules by goodness or whatever it may be and the simple fact is that your rights as granted by the constitution and state constitution and such trump their rules.

if there are some laws you don't know about and they are referencing it may be worth it to look it up. but it sounds to me like it's a blowhard trying to blow down a parent who has valid questions and who doesn't want to bother with the trouble of questioning the teacher since that may lead to issues with the teachers union or whatever.

Regardless, unless another parent has said they don't want you contacting them, or you got the email list in some illegal way (Im in no way saying you did, but just covering the bases here), then you tell the principal and teacher to shove it in a private meeting with them at the school and that their feelings aren't covered by the constitution and you want simple answers. And if they can't give a straight answer that you will take it to the school board and see who is actually following and doing what they are supposed to be doing. But that you in no way have violated any laws or restrictions by asking other parents for their opinions and if they should continue bothering you, you will take it as harrassment. If they want to bring in the idea of malice to another then you already have them bothering you about your free speech rights. *shrugs*

Im sure there's a simple way to hash it out but I hate seeing schools think that just because you are on their property or you go to their school that you suddenly release your rights as granted by the US and such. *shrugs* and Im sure there's a middle of the road approach as well without any need for anything beyond a simple, "No Mr/Mrs Principal I will not stop asking parents for their opinions and if you should dare to suggest I am doing anything against the law I'll see to it defamation/libel charges are brought forward." (Even that's ridiculous so just use your good judgement)

Beware of " Cultural Heritage" projects.
That is often a cover for indoctrination into A specific Religion, usually Islam, or for a minority group, usually Black or Latino.

There is nothing wrong with teaching about other religions and about Minorities and their culture, but all to often its indoctrination about it and it's superiority to everything else and not just general teaching.

I may have missed it, but can you say exactly what the cultural heritage project was and what they had to do?

actually the supreme court ruled that first amendment right for students is limited in school. They can't say god, jesus. They can't wear an american flag on cinco de mayo.
they can't wear plastic bracelets that say "I (heart) boobies" for cancer awareness. they can't quote books that have been banned from school libraries, like huckleberry finn, catcher in the rye, lord of the flies, of mice and men, lol even harry potter.

I'll admit that I haven't read the whole thread. I think what he can do depends on what service you are using for your emails. If it is the school email, then it's entirely possible that he can tell you what you can do on the school's email server. If you want to discuss things unfavorable to the school, you're better off using a service like yahoo or gmail. On your private email, you can pretty much say what you want to, as long as you're not doing something illegal.

bring the matter up at a p.t.a. meeting - stay involved

Wow.

Well, for starters, you some how were given the email list in the first place, so it was provided to you, or made possible for you to obtain the email addresses.

This is bullying for sure, the thing is, they made the mistake, if they didnt want you to use the email addresses personally, they shouldnt have provided the outlet to do so, am I correct?

It does seem like an infringement on free speech. I would definitely contact the media and let them do the legal footwork for you and make it a clip on the nightly news....you will get somewhere with it, if you make it public.

Were you told verbally this (were witnesses present), or was it communicated via email?

The funny thing is, they cant control this. For all they know the parents can wind up on facebook together, or another outlet for communication.

Sorry this happened to you OP, good luck and would love to hear the outcome.

This reminds me of a few years back, when I had formed a new friendship with a vp, who was in a different dept, but definitely a superior to my ex-boss..... and my ex-boss was so bothered by it, she pulled me into the office and told me to 'watch who I am friends with'

... end of story on that didnt fare well for her.

The project was strange. The students had 9 choices, divided into boxes on a cube. The students had to choose three things to present on *and* they had to be in an exact row on the cube. In other words, the kids couldn't just pick three choices.

Some of the choices involved traditional cooking, music, map making, wearing traditional clothing etc...

The problem with the project is that the teacher expected the kids to do this all on their own with no help from parents. Compared to the level of work they'd been doing so far, this was a total shock and virtually impossible for my child to do without me doing 95% of the work. Therefore, my child is probably going to have no lasting memory of this work. Even after the project was over, my child didn't understand what the word heritage meant. Even after explaining it several times as easily as possible.

Is there anything similar you can find online or maybe somehow scan so we could take a look at? They just had to pick from boxes things they needed to discuss in school? We've had to take issue with the school here (many times) before, they do not want kids to learn how to read by "sounding it out" (phonics) and they actually showed my son and his class to hold up their hands and shout "NO!" if someone tries to show him how to do it that way. SCREW THAT!

The assignments like yours that my kids had to do in elementary schools were just plain nuts. My daughter could not write a coherent paragraph, but has to spend 2 months on pictures of the story of gilgamesh and enkidu.
It could make a parent puke.
My word to you is, hang in, it won't last forever.
If you can, take some of your time each day to teach them real lessons at home and also make a program for their time off to teach things they do not get in these wacky projects. I had basic vowel sound lessons and spelling lessons in an old briefcase, for summer.

PHONE TREE!

Start your own newsgroup and invite concerned parents to sign up voluntarily. Name it whatever you'd like and parents can discuss issues there.

If you don't pull your kid out of that school now he or she will be severely abused and punished in order to teach you a lesson. I guarantee it.

I can't fathom any way other than phonics to teach kids how to read.

How is someone supposed to read new words they've never seen before without someone else's assistance if they are not taught to "sound it out"?

Are these kids expected to spend the rest of their lives asking other people "what's that say?" everything time they encounter a new word?

Pretty much. I had the paper scanned but had deleted the image off here...asking my son about it now what the procedure was. To figure out new words, he said the procedure was to use chunks (remember chunks), look at the pictures, memorize what the word looks like, try and guess the word. My kids didn't do this as I wouldn't ALLOW them to, but that was something like how the procedure went.

I'm not an educator, and even I can see the disadvantages of dispensing with the phonics method.

For example, it would certainly make learning a foreign language difficult. The kids would have to start all over again learning entirely new "chunks".

I realize I'm preaching to the choir here. I just don't understand why the schools would insist on "fixing" something that was never broken to begin with.

Are they even keeping track of the results? Has the rate of literacy gone up or down since they've instituted this policy?

I think what I find the most unnerving though is that the school is teaching the kids to "hold up their hands and shout 'no'" if someone tries to tutor them using the phonics method. They are training the children to shout defiantly at adults??? That is despicable!

OK, I'm confused.

Teachers in state-run public schools don't get to alter the curricula that has been approved for that grade level. Private schools, yes -- but not public schools.

Yep. Do this asap.

One of my kids had a twat like this for a principal, a real medallion man. Racist, having affairs with 2 of his staff, encouraging crap teaching. All the parents were too scared to tackle him. I did. He took his spite out on my kid.

Last laugh, medallion man died after a 90mph crash in his sports car on the way to his yacht.


sidebar - what makes you assume that anyone in authority is 'honorable'? You need to start from the opposite premise and wait for them to earn your trust.

They are teaching kids to memorize the words by looks, versus them learning how to sound them out...the method is called whole language.




Phonics versus Whole Language

Phonics is considered a "bottom up" approach where students "decode" the meaning of a text. The advantage of phonics, especially for students who come to schools with large vocabularies, is that once students get the basics down, they can go to the library and read a wide variety of children's literature.

Whole language is a currently controversial approach to teaching reading that is based on constructivist learning theory and ethnographic studies of students in classrooms. It is particularly associated with the work of Ken and Yetta Goodman at the University of Arizona. With whole language, teachers are expected to provide a literacy rich environment for their students and to combine speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Whole language teachers emphasize the meaning of texts over the sounds of letters, and phonics instruction becomes just one component of the whole language classroom.

Whole language is considered a "top down" approach where the reader constructs a personal meaning for a text based on using their prior knowledge to interpret the meaning of what they are reading. Problems associated with whole language include a lack of structure that has been traditionally supplied by the scope and sequence, lessons and activities, and extensive graded literature found in basal readers. Whole language puts a heavy burden on teachers to develop their own curriculum.
[link to jan.ucc.nau.edu]

Your school system/teacher shouldn't have sent out an email where you had all the emails of parents. That may have been violating their privacy .... When I send mass things from where I work, the system automatically defaults to blind carbon copy so that nobody can see the other email addresses. ...

But that is not your fault; it is the school system's.

Don't be afraid of them assholes.
Make him put it in writing then go to the next school board meeting. If that doesn't work contact your State Bd. of Ed.

You can form a parent coalition and exhibit a lot of sway over the school especially considering they probably get about $8000 per student per year.

Can you request that your child be moved to another classroom, in which the teacher does teach the basics, plus. This might be hard on your child but be the fastest and best solution. If you are the first to do this you should get your way, but if other parents have or start doing it they will put a stop to it.

Contact information is probably compiled and distributed in a book by the school. I know for our school at the beginning of the year they ask if we want to have our contact information included.