[bubblewand]

> you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier

No stats, but it’s extremely real.

I know lots of teachers. Parents who flip shit if their kids can’t answer their texts while in class are common. Parents who call their kids in class just to chat are less common, but not as one-in-a-million as you’d think.

The attitude you (I’m assuming) and I were raised with, when it comes to school, is less universal than you perhaps believed. And I mean among adults.

[eudamoniac]

I've never understood something about this phenomenon: why does the school care if the parent flips a shit? What power does the parent actually have in a public school? I always thought it would make more sense for the principal/teacher to give the parent the middle finger in this scenario, but is there some reason I'm unaware of for why that is not realistic?

[bubblewand]

A parent with a certain temperament, which seems to overlap substantially with the sort with stupid expectations and demands, and a lot of time on their hands (which, ditto) can be extremely annoying, raise hell with the media, get the school board involved (some school boards have members who are these kinds of parents, haha) and everybody’s just too busy with actual work to deal with that shit. Enough of it, and they give in just to get them off their backs.

This is why state-level phone bans are so nice, as it keeps these sorts from focusing on school districts, where like five parents can be cause a lot of trouble, and shifts them to focusing on the state level, where a few hundred or a thousand scattered parents with stupid ideas can more easily be ignored and the bar for causing real irritation is a lot higher in terms of time and cost (want to go bother the state legislature, and they’re ignoring your calls? Get ready to travel…)

One super-power of private schools is that they can just tell parents with incompatible ideas of how the school should run to fuck off (and they in-fact do this). Public schools have to deal with them as long as they’re willing to keep poking, which can amount to a surprisingly long time.

[bryanrasmussen]

OK so in fact parents who want their kids to be able to communicate with them as needed, not parents who want their kids to be able to play video games when so desiring?

Of course the ability to do the first gives the ability to do the second, but I think we can agree that they don't as a general rule want their kids to play video games. Again, outliers always exist.

Now as to why parents want their kids to answer when texted that can vary, maybe a lot of reasons are stupid but I can easily construct familial situations where the kid not being able to answer a text is a major disaster and probably parents in that situation flip shit because stuff is way more difficult for them than it is for other people. Probably those parents should have notified the school though, and the school should allow exceptions, but lots of schools are not, in my experience, run by people able to see the need for exceptions.

So I sort of expect that flipping shit happens the more stress there is, some of that can be passive aggressive shit flipping to relieve stress from other places but I would expect, as it matches to my experience in the world, that when shit flipping over trivial stupid stuff happens it is probably because the relatively trivial situation that is being flipped over connects closely to some problematic situation, and thus the trivial situation for most people who flip shit over it is not as trivial as it might be for the general population.

In short I would expect that the tendency to flip shit over the kid not being able to answer calls or texts in class would be proportionate to how absolutely necessary it is for particular family to have the kid answer calls or texts.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

“ familial situations where the kid not being able to answer a text is a major disaster ”

I am having serious trouble coming up with a situation where it’s absolutely necessary for a kid to answer a text during class and not during a break or be notified by the principal office.

[bubblewand]

This behavior is present in plenty of families that don’t have the kinds of pressure on them that you’re describing. It’s not really connected to that (and needing to reach your kid instantly at 11:00AM on a Tuesday isn’t that common a thing to fall out of families being under most sorts of pressure)

I’m telling you, lots of parents just have very different attitudes toward school than one might expect (than I expected, certainly!). The phone stuff is just one manifestation of this.