[talmand]

I can see both of those being true in previous years and today if one cares to look at what's going on. I can even provide an example.

My older daughter has problems with math. She doesn't like it and doesn't want to do it. Therefore, most of the problems she has with it I relate to her more than her teacher. I view it as a problem for both us as parents and her teacher to figure out ways to motivate her to try harder and to discover what problems she may have that we can work on.

On the other hand, she's a really good reader. She loves to read books and often does so without any outside motivation. When we moved to our current school district my daughter was tested for reading on a computer using software she had never seen before and was rated as a poor reader. We disagreed with this result and told the teacher that likely the problem lay with the system that she had never seen before. In her previous year in another school and at home she's a self-motivated reader that is slightly above average for her age group. The teacher stuck with the results and placed her in a lower reading group, where she quickly outpaced the other students in the group. Thankfully, after a few months, she was moved up into an appropriate group for her reading level. In that case I fully fault the teacher in that because she went with an automated system telling her what to do, didn't do an informal test of her own, and ignored her parents on the matter. Later the teacher even suggested that the sudden and large improvement in her reading was due to their reading programs at the school. The conspiracy theory part of me thinks it was intentional so that her reading scores would show a huge improvement through the school year.

You do have to keep that cartoon in mind as a general kind of thing because otherwise it suggests that there is no such thing as a bad teacher.