“My Teacher Keeps Targeting Me for No Reason”: What’s Actually Happening, and How Parents Can Help
Last Tuesday, I leaned across the passenger seat to grab Javi’s crumpled math worksheet off the floor of his backpack, and he swatted my hand away before I got close. “Don’t,” he mumbled, staring out the window at the stop sign. “Ms. Henderson already yelled at me for forgetting it once today. She’s got it out for me. Teachers keep targeting me for no reason.”
Javi’s 12, seventh grade, the kind of kid who usually forgets a bad recess tiff by the time he finishes his after-school granola bar. This wasn’t a one-off complaint. Three weeks earlier, he’d gotten a lunch detention for talking during silent reading, and swore half the class was chatting too. The week before that, she’d called on him three times in one period when he didn’t have his hand up, which he took as a deliberate attempt to embarrass him for zoning out. By that Tuesday, he’d started leaving his hood up in her class even when the heater was broken, just to avoid making eye contact.
I’ll admit my first instinct was split. Half of me wanted to tell him to stop exaggerating, that no adult spends their whole day plotting against a 12-year-old. The other half was already drafting a heated email to the principal, asking why my kid was being singled out for normal middle school behavior. I slept on it; I already had a parent-teacher conference scheduled that Thursday for my 10-year-old’s reading group, so I added 10 minutes at the end to talk about Javi.
The hallway smelled like dry erase marker and burnt microwave popcorn from the teacher’s lounge, and Ms. Henderson’s bulletin board was plastered with lopsided paper fall leaves covered in math puns. I expected her to pull out a log of detentions and start defending herself before I even opened my mouth. Instead, she pulled up her seating chart on her laptop and sighed.
“I’ve been meaning to reach out,” she said. “Javi’s a sweet kid, he gets the work when he’s focused, but I’ve had three parent emails in the last month from kids sitting around him saying they can’t concentrate.”
She walked me through what she saw every day, none of which Javi had mentioned. He sits third row, right by the projector, and when he’s listening, he bounces his leg nonstop, hard enough to shake the desk of the girl in front of him. He clicks his mechanical pen over and over, steady as a metronome, through whole lectures. When a random thought pops into his head, he leans over and whispers it to the kid next to him immediately, no matter if she’s mid-sentence explaining algebra. When she called on him with his hand down, she wasn’t trying to catch him not paying attention—she was trying to yank his focus back before he missed the whole lesson. The day he forgot his worksheet, three other kids forgot theirs too; all got a warning, but Javi rolled his eyes and sighed loud enough for the whole row to hear, so she asked him to stay after class for a minute to reset, which he heard as yelling.
She also admitted she’s got 32 kids in the room this year, no classroom aide, and 25 minutes for lunch most days. She rarely has time to pull a kid aside privately to explain why she’s correcting them, and it never crossed her mind that Javi didn’t notice his own fidgeting. “I wasn’t targeting him,” she said. “I was just reacting to the complaints I kept getting. I get why he’d take it personal, though. I would too, if I was 12.”
I sat in my car for 10 minutes after that meeting before picking Javi up from soccer practice. I’d spent so long seeing this as either Javi making drama up or a teacher being unfair, it never occurred to me there was a whole middle layer neither of them was seeing. I stopped for a blue raspberry slushie on the way home, his favorite, and waited until we were at the kitchen table, cleats by the door and his socks propped on the edge, to bring it up.
I didn’t start with “Ms. Henderson says you fidget too much,” which would have made him shut down immediately. I just asked if he ever notices his leg bouncing when he listens to a lecture, or clicks his pen without thinking about it. He stirred his slushie with his straw for a minute, then shrugged. “Yeah, all the time,” he said. “I don’t even realize I’m doing it until someone tells me to stop. It helps me listen, actually. If I sit still I zone out worse.”
That conversation led to three tiny changes, none of which required testing or formal meetings or big fights. Ms. Henderson moved him to an end seat by the back wall, so his bouncing leg doesn’t shake anyone else’s desk, and he can stand up and stretch for 10 seconds without drawing every eye in the room. They worked out a quiet signal: if she walks by his desk and taps the edge twice, he knows he’s fidgeting too loud or zoning out, and he can pull out the quiet silicone fidget toy he keeps in his pencil case now, no pen clicking required. She stopped calling on him out of the blue to get his attention.
That was six weeks ago. It hasn’t fixed every bad day. Two weeks ago he slammed the front door after school, huffing that she’d given him a lunch detention for being late, when two other kids were late too and got nothing. We walked through it step by step: the other two had stopped to help a sixth grader who’d dropped their inhaler in the hallway, and Ms. Henderson had seen that. Javi had stopped to buy a Gatorade from the vending machine. He still thought it was unfair for an hour, then got distracted by a new Minecraft update and forgot about it.
I’ve talked to enough other parents since this happened to know most “they’re targeting me” complaints land in this same gray area. Kids don’t always notice their own unintentional disruptive habits, and overstretched teachers don’t always take 30 seconds to explain why they’re paying extra attention, and every small correction stacks up until it feels personal. The first thing I tell friends now is don’t pick a side in the first 24 hours. Don’t tell your kid they’re overreacting, and don’t fire off an angry email before you have the full story. Ask for three specific, recent incidents: what happened right before the teacher talked to them, who was around, what exactly was said. Vague “always” complaints get a lot clearer when you nail down details.
When you do reach out to the teacher, skip opening with “my kid says you’re targeting them,” which immediately puts everyone on defense. I opened my conversation with, “Javi’s come home really frustrated lately, saying he feels like he gets in trouble more than other kids for small stuff. I’m wondering what you’re seeing in class that he might not notice himself.” It’s a small shift, but it frames the conversation as problem-solving instead of a fight.
Of course, that doesn’t mean actual targeting never happens. A friend of mine has an autistic Black son who kept getting detentions for the same fidgeting his white neurotypical classmates got away with without a second glance; that took meetings with administration and a formal 504 plan to fix, and it was absolutely a real problem, not a miscommunication. If a teacher can’t name specific, consistent behaviors leading to consequences, or consequences are wildly out of line with what other kids get for the same actions, that’s not a misunderstanding to brush off.
For us, right now, the small adjustments are mostly working. Javi still forgets worksheets sometimes, and Ms. Henderson still has days where she’s too rushed to use the tap signal. Last week he came home and said she’d complimented his renewable energy project in front of the whole class. He tried to play it cool, but I saw him grin into his cereal the next morning when he tucked the graded paper back in his bag. It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t have to be. Most middle school stuff never is.
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