Undermining the Authority of the Teacher

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Well here's one that sound somewhat reminiscent of my life in school and I really don't have too much of a problem with, could be me...

I have 2 sons aged 9 and 5 and both have inherited my AS, though by comparison still very mild. My eldest Louis is much better with social interaction than his brother or I but still has the occasional struggle. His school are pretty understanding, a million times better than a few years ago when I was in the system. Despite this he is still very much ahead of the class and whilst they are considering a jump of a year I think he would be more suited to a 2 year leap or they will find themselves with the same problem a few months into the next term.

Yesterday Louis was sent out of Maths class for 'Undermining the Authority of the Teacher', one I'd never came across personally, I was just thrown out for everything else they could think of to get rid of me. The teacher was explaining something on the whiteboard and the calculation was incorrect. Lou raised his hand and tried to explain the mistake politely but failed to get the message across. This got him a little frustrated to the point of walking up to the front, rubbing out and re-writing the calculation correctly, which got him sent out. Could be my own AS speaking but I fail to see why this was such a problem, 'Okay' he could have approached the situation another way but I don't see it as a reason to further ostracise from his classmates, surely the teacher of all people should get it right in the first place. He doesn't get disruptive when bored like I or his younger brother he just writes music when he is finished his classwork and his teachers are happy with this, but they are going to experience problems such as this as long as he is being taught a curriculum well beneath his ability.

What are your thoughts?

Insecure teacher is insecure about being corrected by a 9 year old?

Certainly appears that way to me, at least he picked up on the mistake than accept being taught something incorrect.

That's outrageous. Your son did the right thing. The teacher's mistake could have affected everyone in the class. That teacher is just ego-injured and needs to start behaving like an adult.

well, i am not an aspie, so i would say that was not the correct way to handle the situation on your sons part. my SO is an aspie and would be totally with you that your sons action was reasonable.

i usually try to explain it to my SO as respect and relationships with people are more important than making sure all the facts and figures are correct. for a student to go up to a teachers work in front of the class and erase it and rewrite it is disrespectful. if having the calculation correct was necessary for the work, then asking quietly about it or approaching the teacher alone is fine, but if it was a correction solely for corrections sake, then its inappropriate.

humans make mistakes, and its ok to let them be. the compulsion to correct or point out mistakes is a form of rigid thinking that i see in my house all the time, and it can get very tiresome for those being corrected.

Well, I understand why your son did what he did. I would probably have done the same thing (hell, I still do that in university but here it is a good thing when you raise your hand and correct the professor with 300+ people in the room).

If the teacher was wrong and would not admit it, he has to admit hit now. How is your son going to learn frome someone who can't even admit to his own fault? Not a great way to keep your credibility as a teacher, even a 9-year-old will understand that.

However, try to explain your son that people can find it rude when you correct them. Even if you are right. This will be very difficult, but he has to learn it at some point. Later in life you will have to bite your tongue more than once to keep yourself from being fired when your supervisor says something stupid.

But, most importantly: technically your son did nothing wrong, and his teacher needs to man up and admit it.

Sadly, this isn't unusual. My youngest is also extremely good at maths...and pretty much anything academic. Sadly they will not jump grades here, no way no how, and he's struggling with severe boredom. He tests at about five grade levels above where he is not just in cognitive processes but in actual acheivement and what he already knows how to do. At school he's not ever learning anything new, just reviewing stuff he figured out ages ago and he's very frustrated. At home we try to challenge him with stuff that won't ever be covered at school so he has a chance of someday learning something there, but so far he stays several steps ahead of all of us, not on purpose, just being himself. It's not like he can just turn his mind off because it's inconvenient.

Still, we've had to teach him to not correct the teacher. Some teachers can handle it, some can't. It's safer for my son to keep quiet. When misinformation is taught he knows he needs to remember the teacher's opinion or the misinformation in his textbooks and regurgitate that back on the tests even though he knows it's wrong. The test isn't about the truth or what's right it's a test of how well you can remember what the teacher said/taught.

So far he's only had one teacher who appreciated him, and that was in second grade. That teacher thought it was very cool that he was smarter than she was and would ask him to correct her if she wasn't sure she'd gotten the grammar lesson right or had done her math wrong. She was a very bright lady, and didn't make a ton of mistakes, but was humble enough to ask a 7yo when she wasn't sure. She is a very gifted teacher.

In third grade they do a unit on greek mythology which is one of my son's favorite subjects. The materials they use are over simplified and get a lot of things wrong. My son has studied that subject at a college level and it drove him nuts that they were teaching things all wrong. He had to learn to cope with it. He's smart enough to keep track of what the teacher wants him to say and the truth, so he manages. I had to do the same thing in school, so at least I could help him.

What I'm saying is that your son is right, the teacher is wrong, but that's not a battle you are likely to win so save your energy if you can. If you can find a better way, then I'm all for it.

Lol, sorry, I can't help it, but BOTH my kids (AS and NT) do that ... and I TOTALLY disagree with the teacher disciplining on it, as it can usually be resolved with a simple talk about rules. My NT daughter's teacher has the right attitude - she wrote on one paper, "thanks for keeping my learning alive!" (I wanted to bury my head laughing when I heard that read out loud, because there I was with visions of my daughter being highly insubordinate ).

BUT, order in the classroom is important, and your son needs to learn the right script for dealing with it when he sees these situations. Since this teacher seems unusually sensitive, you should probably consult her on the script. Next year, get it set early on with the new teacher so that there any such issues are nipped in the bud.

I've noticed that my AS son just absolutely cannot accept it when something is done incorrectly, and clearly incorrectly, and cannot see why anything incorrect would ever be allowed without correction just because someone is the authority and someone is the student. It's quite a conversation to have. Good luck.

Reminds of the detention notice I saw recently on the web. In that case, it was for a student who had the nerve to tell his teacher that a km is not longer than a mile.

The note even said that the teacher was wrong but the student should "accept what the teacher is saying without issue".

Your son probably go so frustrated that at that point, he did not know what else to do. It might be good to teach him to stay silent and he only knows the mistake giving him an advantage.

What is funny is that the book Ender's Shadow gets into the same type of situation.

I did that as a child and got in trouble too. It was frustrating and I did not go the the chalkboard, I would turn around and tell the kids behind me how to do the problem right. The teacher eventually left me alone to reinforce his lessons by quietly tutoring kids in my corner of the classroom. The teachers actually started to listen to my corrections after I learned how to ask for step by step proof of the formula.

One of the reasons my teachers probably hated me so much was because I was always correcting them and often right. My parents always said that was a bad thing to do and to this day I do not understand why. If I was going to learn, I did not want to learn faluse information and I did not think it was right for the other kids to be taught faluse information at the time. I was (and still am) one of those people who if I was to loose a friend or correct a fact, I would choose to loose a friend. Facts are my friends.

What an idiot of a teacher.

Your son at the most should be given a talk on appropriateness of behaviour after class and told to sit down. Teacher should be sacked for being such an arrogant useless ars*hole.

Because teachers know everything. EVERY teacher I've ever encountered thought they knew everything in the universe. That's why they become teachers - so they can feel superior to little kids.