When my identical twins started school they were in different classrooms for Kindergarten. I have two older children and I was extremely overwhelmed at having two kids that were in the same grade doing completely different things. So from then on (until they hit 6th grade) I insisted that they be in the same classroom. The school fought me tooth and nail on this. They thought I was allowing them to use each other as an emotional crutch etc. I explained that I needed them to have the exact same assignments, have the same textbooks, be in the same place in the text books because there are only so many hours in the day. They’ve always had different interests and different friends but I couldn’t handle the homework load. They’ve got different strengths and weaknesses and they could help each other. (There was an incident involving “real” math that I do not understand to this day that one had to explain to the other.)
Every year I’d get their packet a week before school and every year I’d call and remind them that I wanted the twins in the same class. For some reason their fourth grade year packets were not available in advance and I went to school the first day as soon as it opened because I knew they’d split them up again. Once I got it straightened out, I brought the twins to the correct room and the teacher threw an absolute fit. She started screaming at me about school policy etc. I wasn’t about to get into a screaming match with her in front of my kids so I calmly gave a brief explanation as to why I insist we do things this way, I was sorry if she didn’t like it but my job was to ensure my kids got the very best education they could. She was so rude and condescending that I couldn’t stand her and I’d only known her for 10 minutes.
When I left the classroom that day I was absolutely certain I was going to be a fixture in the principal’s office that year. My husband joked on the way out “do you want to go in and make a standing appointment before we leave?”
This teacher turned out to be an absolute gem to my kids. My husband and I were never able to have a pleasant interaction with her (parent-teacher conferences etc) but she was an absolute wonderful teacher. She was their homeroom, English and Social Studies teacher. When she discovered one of the boys was having difficulties in math she took it upon herself to help him during and independent studies period without even being asked. I found out later that she even approached the math teacher on his behalf. It turns out that Matthew does all math in his head (still does to this day even being in honors advanced math, writing it out only confuses him which I’m told will be a problem for him in calculus next year). He wasn’t day dreaming, he was actually working. Here I was scolding him for day dreaming in class because his math teacher kept telling me that’s what he was doing, but this ogre of a woman actually figured out what he was doing and took it upon herself to step up and talk to his math teacher. She let the other teacher know that if he was sitting there “day dreaming” without putting anything on his paper he was actually doing the problem over and over in his head knowing somehow the answer was wrong but trying to figure out where he was making his mistake.