The Parent Teachers Don’t Like (and the Teacher Parents Don’t Like Either)

I found out last spring that my name had come up in a teacher conversation my kid wasn’t supposed to hear.

I don’t know exactly what was said.

I have been the parent who pushed back on an IEP goal, questioned a disciplinary decision, and asked a teacher to explain something twice because the first explanation didn’t sit right with me.

I know what that looks like from the other side of the desk. I really do.

Teachers are carrying things the rest of us don’t fully see. They are underpaid, overwhelmed, and asked to be everything to everyone, every single day. Venting is human. If my name came up in a moment of frustration between two people who were just trying to get through the week, I can hold space for that possibility. I can believe it was smaller than it felt when my child whispered it to me.

But here is what I also know.

When you are the parent of a child who needs more, more advocacy, more accommodation, more of someone showing up and refusing to let things slide, you do not always get to be liked. That is a cost of the job. And most days, I have made peace with it.

Most days.

There are still moments when I want to be the easy parent. The one who gets the warm smile in the pickup line. The one whose name doesn’t carry weight in a staff meeting. I am human, and I want to be seen as someone who is trying her best, not someone who is difficult.

But my child is also trying their best, in a world that was not always built for them. And when those two things are in conflict, my desire to be liked and my child’s need for someone to fight for them, it is not actually a hard choice. It just feels hard sometimes.

Here is the part I don’t say out loud as often.

Because I am also the teacher parents don’t like.

I teach college. My students are adults, even the dual enrollment ones who are still somebody’s baby on paper. FERPA draws a hard line about what I can and can’t say to a parent at all. But a parent who is worried about her child will find a way to reach out anyway, because that’s what love does. It doesn’t read the fine print first.

And here is my confession. I don’t take late work. It’s right there in my syllabus, plain as day. It isn’t because I’m rigid for sport. It’s because I have more students than one person can reasonably carry, and somewhere along the way I learned that the kindest thing I can do for my own sanity is to mean what I say the first time.

This past semester I tried to soften. I told myself I’d make room, be flexible, extend a little grace where I could. And friends, it nearly cost me my mind. Every exception spawned three more. Every door I cracked, somebody else wanted to walk through. By the end of the term I was drowning in second chances I had handed out myself.

And then it bit me, right at the very end.

I had given the whole class a second chance on an assignment. That was the grace, the door I’d cracked open. All a student had to do was resubmit and tell me which assignment it was for, so I would know what I was even looking at. One line. That was the entire ask.

A student turned something in and didn’t say which one it was. I had no way to know what I was grading, so I didn’t enter a grade for it. And a parent was upset.
One parent. One complaint, at the tail end of a semester that had already taken everything I had, and something in me just closed. I don’t have that kind of grace left to give anymore. And I am ashamed of that. I became, for a moment, the exact kind of teacher I don’t want to be.

But here is where I have to get honest with myself.

I could have just guessed which assignment it was and graded it anyway. I could take whatever anyone hands me and never even read it. I could give every student an A and go home, and I would get paid the same amount either way. I might even get better ratings out of it. Easier is always right there.
So why don’t I?

Because at some point I have to ask what else I’m teaching. If a deadline means nothing, if effort and outcome have no relationship to each other, if there’s a third chance and a fourth and a fifth for the asking, then what am I sending these kids into the world believing? That there’s no point in trying your best? That nobody is keeping faith with the ones who did the work on time, the ones who showed up, the ones who tried?

There is a lesson that doesn’t live in the obvious part of the syllabus. It’s the one that says your effort matters. That standards exist not to punish you, but because someone believed you could meet them. That the world will eventually hand you a deadline you cannot move, and it is a mercy to learn that in a classroom instead of somewhere that costs you a great deal more.

And still. I don’t actually know where the line is.

At what point does a grade stop meaning anything at all, if everyone earns the same one no matter what they did to get it? Am I setting these kids up to fail by holding them to something, or am I setting them up to fail by letting it slide? Is that even mine to decide? The world is going to kick them harder than any grade of mine ever could, far harder than anything that happens behind my podium. So maybe my little policy is a mercy. Or maybe it’s just one more tired woman being rigid about something that won’t matter to anybody in five years.

I don’t have the answer to that. I’m not sure there is just one.

And this is the part that makes me laugh, in the tired way you laugh when something is too true to cry about.

I am the parent who is hard to deal with. And I am the teacher who is hard to deal with. I have sat in both chairs, and I have been the difficult one in both of them.

So when that parent emailed me, fighting for her kid, part of me wanted to bristle. But another part of me recognized her. Because that’s me, on the other side of the desk, fighting for my own child. I know that fire. I respect it, even.

I can hold grace for the parent who is advocating for her baby. And I can hold grace for myself, the woman who is so depleted she has nothing left to bend with. Both of those people are doing the best they can with what’s left at the end of a long, hard season.

So much of it comes down to this. Knowing when to draw the line. Knowing which lines are worth the cost of being disliked, and which ones are just exhaustion wearing principle’s coat. I don’t always get it right. But I am learning that grace isn’t the absence of a line. Sometimes grace is the line itself, drawn with love, held with an apology in my heart, and explained as kindly as I know how.

You can be the parent they complain about and still be the parent your child needed. You can be the teacher they complain about and still be the one who refused to teach them that nothing matters.

Sometimes grace looks less like being easy and more like being present, even when it costs you something.

Even people liking you. On both sides of the desk.