teachers

I have the greatest respect and admiration for teachers and consider them highly undervalued and under paid. Still , now and then I just want to beat one to a pulp. My S finally motivates himself to study and study his math until he masters it. He walks into and out of the test feeling confident. When we get it back we discover , that yes, he did learn the subject and got almost all of the answers correct. However, the evil, should be retired, math teacher lowers his grade two full grades because he didn't show his work! No wait, he did show his work, just not as much as she wanted him to. Does this women have any concept of how hard it is to 1) get a teenage boy to care about his work and 2)to then do something concrete and effective about it? Nice way to send him the message that trying is useless because I'll just find a way to screw you over anyway. So now, I have to e mail her (done), then when she refuses to do anything about it yell, cry and plead my way through the school administration. All of which will probably amount to nothing. I am already frustrated and I haven't even started the ordeal yet. It is so unfair to this kid. While he may bring some (lots?) of stuff on him all by himself in this case he did the right thing and is getting no positive reinforcement. Ugh!