What To Do When Your Child Says ‘Some Of My Teachers Mock Me’
I was scraping dried peanut butter off a dinner plate, the open dishwasher humming that warm, damp smell into the kitchen, when my 13-year-old Javi leaned against the fridge and said it. He twisted the frayed drawstring of his gray hoodie, still damp from the walk home from the bus stop, and kept his eyes on the magnet of our old dog. “Some of my teachers mock me.”
I put the plate down slow. I’d heard the small complaints for weeks, the offhand comments after school: Mr. Henderson makes fun of people when they mess up math problems, Ms. Lopez laughs when someone stumbles reading out loud. Javi’s had dyslexia since second grade, and he’s always been the kid who will raise his hand even when he’s not sure, just because he wants to participate. I knew it was getting to him, but I didn’t expect him to say it that plain, like it was a fact he’d been carrying around long enough to get used to.
He told me the specific story, the one that made him say something. Two days before, he’d done his current event presentation for social studies. He’d practiced for three nights with me, stumbling over half the words, erasing and rewriting his notes in big print so he could read them easier. When he got up front, he mixed up “climate change” and “crime change” – the same letters, just shifted, the kind of mix-up that happens even when he practices. Before he could correct himself, Mr. Henderson, the main teacher, leaned against the desk at the front and said, “Javi, did you even look at this assignment before you walked up here?” The whole class roared. Ms. Lopez, the special ed co-teacher that’s supposed to have his back, snickered into her lesson plan book. He just mumbled through the rest and sat down, and no one said anything about it after.
I wanted to grab my keys and drive straight to the school that minute. But Javi shook his head when I said that, pulled his hood up a little higher. “It’s not that big. It just sucks. And if you go yell at them, they’ll just be nicer to my face and meaner when you’re not around.” He had a point. I’ve been a parent long enough to know that rushing in to fix everything often makes it worse for the kid stuck in the middle.
So I started small. First, that night, I sat down with Javi and wrote down every specific incident he could remember: dates, what exactly was said, who was there, what happened after. No generalities like “they’re always mean to me” – just “October 12, presentation, Mr. H said ‘did you even read this’ whole class laughed, Ms. L snickered.” That took 10 minutes, and it made a huge difference when I talked to the teachers later, because I wasn’t coming in with a vague complaint, I was talking about specific things that happened.
Next, I emailed both teachers individually, asked for 15 minutes before school the next week, no principal, no other staff, just us to chat. I didn’t mention “bullying” or “harassment” in the email, just said I wanted to talk about Javi’s experience in class and work out a small plan.
When I met with them, I didn’t lead with anger. I started with what Javi told me, word for word, pulled out my notes. To my surprise, one of them didn’t even realize what she’d done. Ms. Lopez said she’d been distracted that day, thinking about the IEP meeting she had right after, and it was just a nervous laugh, not a laugh at Javi. She apologized right away, and said she’d be more careful. Mr. Henderson got defensive at first, said it was just classroom banter, kids need to learn to take a joke. I didn’t argue with him about thick skin. I just told him that Javi works twice as hard on every assignment as most kids in his class, that he’d stopped raising his hand entirely over the past two months, that he’d asked me to let him opt out of all oral presentations for the rest of the semester. Then I gave him two concrete asks: if Javi messes up a word or a problem in front of the class, just correct it and move on, no extra comments. If he’s off task or didn’t do the work, pull him aside after class to talk about it instead of calling him out in front of everyone. He agreed, said he hadn’t realized it went that far.
It’s been a month now. It’s not perfect. Last week Javi came home and said Mr. Henderson made a quiet joke about someone being slow to get their book out, and it still made him slump down in his seat. But he also told me he raised his hand three times in math last Tuesday, that he didn’t even panic when he got the answer wrong because Mr. Henderson just said “nice try, let’s look at it again” and moved on.
I used to think if this happened, I’d have to start a big fight, get admin involved, make someone punished. But what I’ve learned is that most of the time, this kind of mocking isn’t even intentional. Teachers are tired, they have 30 kids in a room, they say offhand things without thinking about how a kid who already struggles with feeling behind will hear it. For parents, the best first step isn’t storming the office – it’s getting the specific story from your kid, going in with clear, small asks instead of big accusations, and putting your kid’s comfort first, not “winning.” Don’t dismiss it as just teasing, even if it seems small to you. If it feels like mocking to your kid, it is. For teachers, if a parent comes to you saying a kid felt hurt by a comment, just stop and listen. You don’t have to defend yourself right away. A 10-second check-in after class, a small shift in how you talk in front of the group, can change everything for that kid.
Javi still doesn’t love getting up in front of the class. He still comes home some days quiet, with that twist to his mouth that tells me something happened. But he’s talking about it now, instead of carrying it around. That’s more than I thought we’d get this semester.
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