that one kid

I suppose I hadn't slept enough - grading papers and all - but I woke up, went to school, and had a tough day all day.  I was feeling anxious and unhappy.  It could have had to do with the parent meeting I was scheduled to have the next day, or that my team lead wasn't communicating well with me, or that I was too tired of it all to work at it.  

Before parent-conferences, I got a hostile email on a Friday afternoon from the tutor of a student of mine.  She accused me of "unacceptable behavior", demotivating the student, accusing him of cheating in front of the whole class, and that he'd been crying everyday since - she informed me that his mother was a pediatrician, and they both don't approve of me.

Nice.   The incident had happened three earlier, and now I couldn't sort it out until Monday...

I felt terrible about it.  The kid was a sweet boy, worked hard, always volunteered and gave feedback to his peers - the model student, except his answers were 90% of the time wrong.  His last two exams were 44% and then improved to a 56%.  

In going over the last exam - I had asked what a stereotypical business person looked like - testing vocabulary.  I share that someone had wrote that a stereotypical business person wore smokin'.  Two boys said, "I wrote that!" To which I responded,
"Yes, come to think of it - it is very odd that you made the same verb  and word mistake, used and spelled the same word wrong, and you were sitting next to each other.... did you copy?"
Both boys shook their heads.
And I let it go.  Both kids were good kids, and even if they did copy, it didn't help either of them - and it was only one questionable copy.

Apparently, the one boy went home and their was a big fight at home - I'm not sure if it was because of his low exam scores or really because of the conversation - but it came back to me that he was now entirely demotivated because of my behaviors.

I really did feel bad - I didn't need to take the responsibility for this, but then again - as his teacher, I should have intervened more after the last exam.  The tutor's words were mean and she was probably fearful about losing her job (because she is responsible for these scores as well), but with everybody working so hard - why was he failing?