Hey, I get it: parents get really worked up when it comes to their kids and how their education is handled…
And who is hearing about it…
And that brings us to today’s story from Reddit’s “Am I the A**hole?” page!
Take a look at what’s going on here and see what you think.
AITA for telling my son’s teacher to speak to me, not my girlfriend?
“This happened a few weeks ago but the situation was brought up again recently.
I (28M) have a son, Nathan (6M). I’m his sole parent because his mother lost the custody battle.
His school was made aware of this when I removed his mother’s details from their system and his current teacher for grade one has not met my ex. Due to the nature of the custody battle, his teacher does know about my ex for safety reasons as she has been barred from coming to the school to get him. Basically, she knows that if she ever sees me with a woman, it is definitely not my ex.
His school has parent teacher meetings twice a year, once before the Christmas break and another at the end of the academic year.
I’ve been dating my girlfriend, Venus (24F) for the past eight months and she has an amazing relationship with my son. He likes her a lot and he asked me if she could come with me to the parent teacher conference because he wanted her to hear that he’s doing well at school.
My son used to struggle with English as his mother tongue is Spanish. My Spanish is okay but Venus is fluent, so she helped him improve his English speaking by tutoring him.
At the meeting, I noticed that the teacher was only speaking to Venus. She was making eye contact with her and only directing conversations to her. I found this annoying because although I know most primary parents are women, the teacher is well aware that I’m Nathan’s sole parent.
Venus kept redirecting the conversation to me and I did ask a few questions but the teacher would speak to me for a few seconds, and then go back to speaking to Venus only. Eventually, I said ‘im sorry to interrupt you but I’m Nathan’s father and I’d appreciate it if you spoke to me’.
The teacher seemed taken back and irritated but she apologized and spoke to me for the rest of the meeting.
I told my brother in law (sister’s husband) about what happened and he thinks I overreacted. He said that while he does find it annoying when teacher only speak to my sister at meetings, he understands that it’s not out of malice and just a force of habit since mothers tend to be more involved than fathers.
He also said it was my fault for bringing Venus along to the meeting. He thinks it was an a**hole move for me to interrupt the teacher and make her feel like she did something wrong for something that was most likely not malicious.
It was brought up again at Christmas because Venus spent it with my family and my mother asked Venus if she had Nathan’s inhaler and my BIL interrupted and said ‘Careful, (my mom’s name), Mark (me) might freak now’.
I would like to put this situation to rest. AITA?”
Let’s see what Reddit users said about this.
This reader said he’s NTA and they teacher knew what they were doing.
Photo Credit: Reddit
Another individual agreed that he isn’t an a**hole and they added their two cents.
Photo Credit: Reddit
And this reader said he’s NTA but encouraged him to learn a lesson from this experience.
Photo Credit: Reddit
What do you think?
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