Parents I Hate

I just got out of a class where I was assisting a math teacher. I was sitting in the back next to a boy who sat in his desk doing absolutely nothing. I told him to do the warm up, but he kept saying he didn't know how to do this. Of course, the real problem was that he just didn't want to. The teacher was there to show him and everyone in the class how to do proportions. I made him copy the problem on the overhead projection to a piece of paper, but didn't do anything after that. I asked if his parents make him do his homework. He said that they make him do his homework, except for math. His mother doesn't know how to do this math. His father does, but his father lives in Corona. The heart of the problem has nothing to do with which parent knows how to do the math. His parents have taught him to give up on himself.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is full of students with parents who teach their children to give up. Parents and politicians can punish teachers all they like, but teachers can do nothing to stop bad parents from ruining the education, and by extension, the lives of the children. All I can do about such parents is hate them.