What teachers want to tell parents
cnn.com
cnn.com
Yet my experience has led me to believe that K-12 didn't matter.
I learned to read at home, so they didn't give me that. I was constantly stifled; from my perspective as a child, I saw that my own interests were almost systematically kept out of reach (as an adult, I can see far further as to why and how this situation came to be - but at the time, all I could do is to see their chains and rebel). I was routinely in trouble from sixth grade on up. Remember those end-of-year class trips you went on? They never let me go because I was such trouble! I graduated high school with a D average.
The one thing they did do is to set back my educational development by about three or four years. Once I was finally free, I had time to grow unhampered. I discovered that learning was actually the opposite of prison, and that it had everything to do with the things I was interested in. I studied all kinds of things independently, and when I was ready, I took a couple of calculus courses at a community college to prove that I was serious. On that basis, I was able to gain acceptance at a well-respected university, where I majored in molecular biology and graduated with distinction.
If proponents of public education really cared about what was best for me, they would have left me alone. My experience shows that a K-12 education wasn't necessary to prepare me for college, or for life.
Edit: I'm not saying that no child benefits from their K-12 education - it is clear that some do. But why must it be involuntary? What justifies the laws that compelled my parents to send me to a place they knew (at some level) was hurting me?
Benign paternalism which says "X% of students really dislike the experience of attending school. The average case for dropouts is 'totally $&$#ed.' We'll institutionalize them now because it is a darn sight cheaper than institutionalizing them later, permanently."
It was an imposition on you to go to school. At the time, it may even have felt like a major imposition. You'll get over it. We imposed upon your time because e.g. a poor kid in your local inner city who prefers hanging to all that books n' shit would, with about 100% certainty, durably ruin their life given the option not to attend school. It is very hard to "get over" being poor, illiterate, with a criminal record, etc.
Why do you assume I was a well-off kid, or that I had great a social support network? There were a couple of times (early on) when my parents were flat-out broke. I didn't wear new clothes to school until I was thirteen.
Even the poor inner city kid has free choice. It is simply not true that all people will deterministically fail given the same adverse circumstances. Why did Michael Faraday rise to become a prominent physicist and chemist, despite his poor background and total lack of social support? At adulthood, despite whatever adverse conditions endured previously, all people are responsible for their own lives (excepting people who truly cannot help it, i.e., those with grave mental illnesses).
And for the record, I am a contextual absolutist, which is something altogether different than an absolutist.
(To conclude that something is possible, or probable, and not yet certain is itself an example of this process.)
To use your example, people often claim that Newton was proven wrong by Einstein. But I disagree. Newton's context included observations of the local solar system, and depended on the instruments of his time. His system still works in the majority of situations encountered today. Because the context hasn't changed appreciably in those situations, we can apply his mechanics and claim that they are correct. Conversely, GPS and particle physics and the like are out of bounds, contextually. For that, you must understand relativity, which is another truth that is absolutely true in a still wider context.
Of course, there is a price to pay for relativity, which is extra computational and pedagogical complexity. Indeed, this alone is enough to keep Newton around for millennia to come. Remember that knowledge is not an end in itself, despite what some may say. All knowledge is a means to some end. We don't all know the same things, and we can't anyway.
Finally, how could we ever get to the point where we can appreciate relativity, or engineer systems where it is necessary to know about that if we were to simply discard Newton's theory as "false"? Science (and indeed all knowledge) is all about what some deride as mere "scaffolding." But I don't deride it - and that's why I'm a contextual absolutist.
Just as I'm not posting this reply as a result of anyone else's effort but my own (not).
> Even the poor inner city kid has free choice. ... At adulthood, ... all people are responsible for their own lives (excepting people who truly cannot help it, i.e., those with grave mental illnesses).
I used to think free will and personal responsibility were among the absolutes of the universe. These days I'm not nearly so sure. We know so little about why different people perceive the world, and choose behaviors, in such different ways. "Grave mental illness" seems to be just one end of a continuum.
I am not in any way saying that people don't reap the benefits of living in society with other people. But your ability to travel at 70 MPH came as a result of people thinking on their own first, which set the stage for productive exchanges between people on a team. The fact that this is a virtuous cycle often confuses people into thinking that thought is a collective activity. But it is not: while I have benefited immensely from people grading my exams and papers, in conversation, code reviews, pair programming (from an earlier career), etc., I still had to prepare for all of those things alone. Without independent thought, what value could I bring to the table?
I spend a lot of time these days wondering if I should home school my children. I learned so much more at home than I did at school. I'd hate to give my children the type of experience I did in public school.
All four of my children have always been homeschooled until this week. My oldest is grown up, living on his own on his own dime while he finishes up his college degree program--or perhaps founds a start-up before finishing his degree. (He is an occasional participant here, mostly in threads different from the threads I post in.) My second son began attending our local public high school the day after United States Labor Day. So he is in his third day of classroom school as I type this. He commented last evening "I know it's only been two days, but I already notice that I can learn faster when I homeschooling than at school." He and my wife and I will continue to discuss what trade-offs are most important in making his educational plans. My third son was just driven by my wife this morning across our sprawling metropolitan area for a joint homeschoolers class on physics, taught by a Ph.D. physicist who takes time off from engineering and inventing work at a big corporation to teach the class. There are a lot of very interesting learning opportunities for homeschoolers these days.
After edit: I just saw this response to the submitted article that opened the thread here
http://www.parentatthehelm.com/6666/homeschooling-parent-res...
from a homeschooling parent with even more experience than I have. Her perspective is her own.
Classes did not challenge me, but I buckled down, listened to lecture, did my homework in class, and read when there was nothing else to do. As everyone here is so fond of stating, if you're "too smart for school" you can teach yourself in the evenings or even during class--but don't rob your child of the opportunity to try new things, meet people, and for god's sake GET OUT OF THE FUCKING HOUSE FOR A WHILE.
You are speaking like someone with little knowledge of and/or interaction with the homeschool population. You seem to have some severe misunderstandings about the homeschool community. I think you should alleviate this large hole in your knowledge before you berate a lifestyle you aren't familiar with.
The nearest towns to mine were all about 40 minutes away, and not even the largest one had more than 20,000 people--not a big population to draw homeschoolers from. In the case of the homeschoolers I met, I definitely got the impression that their lives had been pretty well isolated, outside of church--religion being the reason they were homeschooled in the first place.
I appreciate the way public school throws you into a mix with a bunch of people you would not normally be around. Do homeschool kids sit in the back of the bus and have the weird dude show them how to make a marijuana pipe out of a pepsi can? When you're hanging with other homeschool kids, is there really that much opportunity to learn how to deal with macho cholo bullshit when all you want them to do is load the band truck? To me, it seems like it would generally be a very restricted community: deeply religious people who don't want their children polluted, and parents who are well-off and smart enough to do the teaching themselves.
I probably could have learned more academically being homeschooled, but at least where I grew up, public school was the only social game in town, and looking back I am glad I went. When I have kids, there will be serious consideration to homeschooling for a while, but I strongly believe that their first year or two of school and at least some of the middle/high school years should be spent at a public school.
Sit still, quietly do your work (which means memorization) and do your time (x hours per day for x days per week for x years), and you will get your degree, which would lead to a job working in a factory where you can do the same until retirement.
Our economy has changed, our culture has changed, and the schools are changing (I see that with my own daughter's experience), but for many people my age, we suffered through the change without support.
Now, the really big elephant in the room is the collegiate education system, which has become a system of paying exorbitant sums of money for a degree that will never pay for itself, for most students.
which means memorization
For example, in third grade my class had to memorize the multiplication table up to 12x12, but we didn't have to memorize that multiplication is really just a shorthand for repeated addition, so by eighth grade there were kids in my class that didn't understand why I wrote 6x5 instead of 5+5+5+5+5+5 in certain cases; they were also amazed that I managed to get the right answer even though i didn't do the problem the right way. We also had to memorize the squares of every number up to 20, but we didn't have to memorize the fact that squaring is a shorthand for multiplication of some number by itself, so some kids in my class could tell you that 15 squared was 225, but had to use paper and pencil to tell you what 15*15 was. And don't even get me started on kids who knew that 9x7=63, but had to use pencil, paper, and long division to tell you that 63%9=7.
A better example to express your point would be multiplication tables. Why memorize a list of multiplicands and their products rather than learn what multiplication means so that you can generate them on the fly and only memorize as a by-product of common use?
In order to learn something usefully, and be able to retain that knowledge for years to come, you must have a fundamental understanding of the underlying principles.
They were completely hands off. No lectures or anything of that sort. They only provided problems for the students to solve. If you needed help, they would point you to the nearest computer with internet access. Failing that, a shelf of books. Not only did you have to learn the subject matter, but you had to learn how to learn. I took away far more from their classes than I did in any other. If we want our students to become brilliant engineers and scientists, we need to reduce the "education" and increase the learning.
As an aside, I distinctly remember one of them stating that school would become unnecessary in the future. The internet would provide everything required to learn as you see fit. I honestly believe that time is here. If you teach the kids how to learn, they will.
1. Brought in a financial broker who taught us how to read the stock pages
2. Ran for a local political office so we could see how the process really worked. He would talk about his debate experiences, his polling numbers and his platform to us in a completely matter-of-fact way, and this fascinated me to the political process. Probably the best nugget was the reality, which he brought up, was that while he tried his best to be charismatic, he just wasn't, and his efforts to get noticed as a candidate were effectively shouting in the wind. He was resoundingly defeated in the elections, just another no-name candidate in a sea of people who most voters have never heard of, but our class learned more about politics in one school year than decades of watching CNN.
The reason for this is that the more wealthy and highly educated your parents are, the less you learn in school as a kid, even though you likely go to a better school. (Or, to be more precise, you learn roughly the same amount as low-SES kids in absolute terms, but it's a much smaller percentage of your total learning.)
For example, how do you measure the knowledge someone possesses in a cost-effective way? Schools have settled on standardized tests; the worst method, except all the others. And this is hardly unique to schools - consider the typical software job interview questions. Once the end goal (passing tests) is in place, there is incentive for schools is to teach their students content that might show up on the test. If your interests align with this content, great, otherwise you're forced to slog through it anyways.
One solution I've heard is specializing sooner, but for many kids making the decision this early might prematurely lock them into a career they don't actually like or that has poor job prospects. Sure, some will be able to make the correct decision, but how do you decide who is able to do this? Standardized maturity tests?
I think the root problem is that to really make the right decision for each child there has to be constant involvement with the child's development from an individual educator. This kind of attention is not cheap and is the antithesis of the current CYA direction that educational institutions are taking.
At any rate, what does that matter? Why should the interests of one child (or adult) necessarily conflict with that of any other, or group of them? Is the goal that everyone should flourish the most from wherever they start, or is it that they should end up with the most identical result possible, regardless of the individuals?
Edit: remember that a statistical approach is only valid in a certain context. For example, you only need evidence that a judge has taken bribes from the Mafia once to know that he's corrupt. There are other contexts where statistics are vital (in the special sciences, for example - I think of quantum probability, or statistical thermodynamics), but I don't believe that statistics properly enter into the fundamental science of philosophy and its branches (Plato, so far as I am aware, did not rely on statistical concepts to discover that there's such a thing as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and then politics). If statistics were a fundamental science (intellectually speaking), on what basis could we justify its correct uses vs. incorrect ones?
For their part my parents largely stayed out of my education. I was not a good student but all the teachers said I was a very smart kid. My parents were satisfied with that but always did whatever they could to encourage me to be a better student. In the end though, nothing really changed until I chose to be a better student and work harder. The life lessons of being responsible for my own situation and my own education stuck with me and were good for me.
As for teachers heaping all of the blame on defensive parents. I'd suggest they would do good to remember many parents were students once too. They remember just how traumatic school can be (as it often was for me) and how vicious and horrible a teacher can seem when they decide to single out a student for punishment. I can hardly blame some of them for acting defensively. Stop the "poor me" routine and try some empathy instead. My parents were perfectly happy to let me learn my own life lessons, but occasionally a teacher decided to make it their life's mission to "fix" me. Those experiences were usually terrible. In the end the best teachers simply chose to believe in me and looked extra disappointed when I didn't try hard. That was usually punishment enough.
Honestly, I'd say the biggest problems with education these days are not the parent, or the teachers but rather are systematic. I think we'd all be better off focusing on that if we wan't it to improve, rather than parents blaming the teachers and vice-versa.
Teachers really don't know the kids as well as the parents do. This isn't the teachers fault, its because they're having to control 20 kids at once. Still, I've noticed as a volunteer many times where children have gotten reprimanded for doing something by one teacher when they were only following directions given by another. Because these children really cannot stand up for themselves, often times they don't know how to respond which can result in a number of different behaviors.
The burden of maturity should be falling on the adults (teachers and parents), not the children and yet so often its the children who respond in the most mature way.
Yes parents should not be so defensive when discussing their children with teachers, but at the same time those parents SHOULD be the advocate for their child who does not yet know how (or have the power to) to stand up for themselves.
Imagine you take your child to the doctor, and the doctor says that your child drinking several milkshakes a day is bad for his health and leading him to obesity. If the parent went on and on making excuses for him--"Billy gets stressed out by school and needs milkshakes to unwind!" we would rightfully mock the parent. But when teachers give feedback about how they've observed Billy picking on other kids, parents require proof that their special snowflake would ever do such a terrible thing and, when proven, start looking for reasons that the other kid brought it on himself.
Everyone's on the same side, here. And to be fair, though doctors and teachers are both professionals, the higher status and respect given to doctors is in many ways earned through very hard work. But teachers are professionals too, not ex-convict nanny babysitters who are out to get your kid, and their suggestions and criticisms deserve serious consideration.
Sometimes it is, and in those cases parents need to advocate for their children. The unfortunate truth is that there are asshats in every segment of the population, including teachers and school administrators. Parents need to be prepared to defend their children in case they end up with an asshat for a teacher or principal.
I lived in Germany through the fifth grade, and attended German public schools through the fourth grade. My fourth grade teacher hated me because I was American. This is not a guess, she literally told me on the first day of school that, unlike all of the other children, I would not be given the benefit of the doubt but would rather have to "prove myself" because I was American. She also regularly made negative or disparaging comments about Americans in general. Based on her age, she must have been in elementary school herself during WWII, and I'm guessing she had some bad experiences. My parents literally had to have an adversarial relationship with her for my sake, and ended up pulling me out of the German public school system at the end of the year and putting me into a joint German-American school because she would have been my homeroom teacher again the next year (we kept the same teachers for three-year blocks: one set for grades 1-3, another for grades 4-6).
When we moved back to the states, they ended up needing to adopt an adversarial relationship with the principal at my new elementary school. As the "new kid," the top bully had singled me out for special attention. Any time we had an encounter, no matter how one-sided, the principal would dish out equal punishment to both of us because he was too lazy to figure out the difference between "two boys fighting on a schoolyard," and "one boy punching another boy in the back of the head repeatedly without warning or provocation." Fortunately, the principal was also stupid and craven. After he suspended both of us one day for an incident where I had not even tried to fight back, I called my parents from the phone in the school library (it was an in-school suspension) and told them what happened. They promptly called him and asked him to explain the situation. He told them a bald-faced lie about what had occurred, then called me into his office and yelled at me for daring to call my parents. Fortunately, my parents hadn't bought his story and had left the house immediately after getting off the phone with him. We lived close enough to the school that they walked into his office while he was still screaming at me at the top of his lungs. My father had been home that day so he had come to the school with my mother, and I'm still not sure how my mother kept him from beating that man, but she did. I was sent back to the library, and after about fifteen minutes I was told my suspension had been rescinded and I went back to class. After that the principal never looked me in the eye again. My parents had a series of meetings with the school board and various people at the school district, and at the end of the school year the principal was "promoted" to a dead-end administrative job at the superintendent's office. I don't know the details of what they worked out, but some of the shit he said while yelling at me was completely inexcusable and would not have looked good at all on the front page of the newspaper.
I'd almost certainly ask my son that. Seems like a good way to get them talking about the issue, and hear any mitigating factors they might consider. A teacher who took that as a me questioning their authority ... grow up and deal with it.
Bottom line: not only is it a good way to engage with the child, sometimes the teacher really is making false accusations.
The reason that the teacher sees that repeatedly is that its an effective technique. It establishes a level of trust between the child and parent--the parent is willing to hear out the kid. And it immediately puts the kid in a tough position unless s/he fesses up to the misdeed. Getting buy-in from the child about the legitimacy of what's happening is very useful when trying to figure out how to deal with it.
Of course, implicitly by asking for the kid's word that this happened the parent is opening up the possibility that the teacher is lying. But it's necessary, and even if the kid rejected it I'm sure most parents would almost certainly still believe the teacher's narrative. It's just a pro-forma verbal tactic to get appropriate buy-in from the child. I'm not surprised that a teacher would superficially feel a bit miffed by that, but they should understand and (however grudgingly) accept the reasons its helpful.
> Well, of course it's true. I just told you.
Teacher, to parent: "(You need to listen to me.) Who do you think knows your child better? Me, or you!?"
The very act of doing this seems to irritate the author - which I find very disturbing. Trust, but verify, is the principle here.
Asking the child if what the teacher said is true is seen as an affront on the author's character as a person, not as a teacher, so it's reasonable for them to take offense at the accusation.
It's entirely reasonable not to trust the teacher's authority by default--I'm not challenging that. I'm only defending the author's position on taking offense to being challenged on something that was just said.
Hearing the student's opinion is valuable on its own, and parents don't ask to test the integrity of the teacher.
Also, it has some value by making the student admit his actions.
You can choose your lawyer, choose your doctor, choose your auto mechanic etc. You can take their advice, look for someone different or just seek a second opinion.
For parents with children in public school they have no choice who teaches their children.
Get arrested, can't afford your own lawyer, you get one for free provided by the state. You don't get to choose. Get really sick and rushed to the hospital, you get a doctor for free provided by the state or hospital. You don't get to choose. Car breaks, tough shit. State's not going to pay to fix it. Ride the government subsided bus. Lose your job, get welfare and food stamps. Go find another one yourself.
Same goes for education. Don't like your kid's teacher or school, go pay for a private school or tutor or home school. That's how everything in life is. If you don't like what's provided by your government for "free," go pay for your own.
"Free" as in you are required to pay taxes, it's compulsory. Same way you pay for public defenders for those who can't afford (or don't want) to hire their own lawyers, you will pay for public schools for those who can't afford (or don't want) private ones.
Deal with it.
In the scenario you present, I would expect adamtmca to question advice from the appointed physician, lawyer, etc. as they would that of the public schoolteacher.
I'd go even further to state that you should aways question the assertions of specialists regardless of their credentials or prior experience when their opinion does not agree with your own; any rational professional should be capable of explaining there position reasonably and if they cannot, then further evaluation is in order.
Of course I wasn't asserting that in every situation you are able to choose the specialist you work with.
I was pointing out that public school parents have little to no opportunity to evaluate and choose their children's teachers and, understandably, this makes accepting a teacher's opinion carte blanche seem pretty unreasonable, even foolish.
Picking who teaches your children should be nothing like arriving in the emergency room with a bullet wound. It's not hard to conceive of a public education system where parents are given a lot more choice about the teachers teaching their children.
From his 1995 interview with Daniel Morrow for the Smithsonian institute. http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/sj1.html#...
SJ: I've been a very strong believer in that what we need to do in education is to go to the full voucher system. I know this isn't what the interview was supposed to be about but it is what I care about a great deal.
DM: This question was meant to be at the end and we're just getting to it now.
SJ: One of the things I feel is that, right now, if you ask who are the customers of education, the customers of education are the society at large, the employers who hire people, things like that. But ultimately I think the customers are the parents. Not even the students but the parents. The problem that we have in this country is that the customers went away. The customers stopped paying attention to their schools, for the most part. What happened was that mothers started working and they didn't have time to spend at PTA meetings and watching their kids' school. Schools became much more institutionalized and parents spent less and less and less time involved in their kids' education. What happens when a customer goes away and a monopoly gets control, which is what happened in our country, is that the service level almost always goes down. I remember seeing a bumper sticker when the telephone company was all one. I remember seeing a bumper sticker with the Bell Logo on it and it said "We don't care. We don't have to." And that's what a monopoly is. That's what IBM was in their day. And that's certainly what the public school system is. They don't have to care.
Let's go through some economics. The most expensive thing people buy in their lives is a house. The second most expensive thing is a car, usually, and an average car costs approximately twenty thousand dollars. And an average car lasts about eight years. Then you buy another one. Approximately two thousand dollars a year over an eight year period. Well, your child goes to school approximately eight years in K through 8. What does the State of California spent per pupil per year in a public school? About forty-four hundred dollars. Over twice as much as a car. It turns out that when you go to buy a car you have a lot of information available to you to make a choice and you have a lot of choices. General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota and Nissan. They are advertising to you like crazy. I can't get through a day without seeing five car ads. And they seem to be able to make these cars efficiently enough that they can afford to take some of my money and advertise to other people. So that everybody knows about all these cars and they keep getting better and better because there's a lot of competition.
DM: There's a warranty.
SJ: And there's a warranty. That's right. But in schools people don't feel that they're spending their own money. They feel like it's free, right? No one does any comparison shopping. A matter of fact if you want to put your kid in a private school, you can't take the forty-four hundred dollars a year out of the public school and use it, you have to come up with five or six thousand of your own money. I believe very strongly that if the country gave each parent a voucher for forty-four hundred dollars that they could only spend at any accredited school several things would happen. Number one schools would start marketing themselves like crazy to get students. Secondly, I think you'd see a lot of new schools starting. I've suggested as an example, if you go to Stanford Business School, they have a public policy track; they could start a school administrator track. You could get a bunch of people coming out of college tying up with someone out of the business school, they could be starting their own school. You could have twenty-five year old students out of college, very idealistic, full of energy instead of starting a Silicon Valley company, they'd start a school. I believe that they would do far better than any of our public schools would. The third thing you'd see is I believe, is the quality of schools again, just in a competitive marketplace, start to rise. Some of the schools would go broke. Alot of the public schools would go broke. There's no question about it. It would be rather painful for the first several years DM: But deservedly so.
SJ: But far less painful I think than the kids going through the system as it is right now. The biggest complaint of course is that schools would pick off all the good kids and all the bad kids would be left to wallow together in either a private school or remnants of a public school system. To me that's like saying "Well, all the car manufacturers are going to make BMWs and Mercedes and nobody's going to make a ten thousand dollar car." I think the most hotly competitive market right now is the ten thousand dollar car area. You've got all the Japanese playing in it. You've got General Motors who spent five million dollars subsidizing Saturn to compete in that market. You've got Ford which has just introduced two new cars in that market. You've got Chrysler with the Neon.
DM: So you're spending thirty-two thousand and getting a five hundred dollar car in some cases.
SJ: The market competition model seems to indicate that where there is a need there is a lot of providers willing to tailor their products to fit that need and a lot of competition which forces them to get better and better. I used to think when I was in my twenties that technology was the solution to most of the world's problems, but unfortunately it just ain't so. I'll give you an analogy. Alot of times we think "Why is the television programming so bad? Why are television shows so demeaning, so poor?" The first thought that occurs to you is "Well, there is a conspiracy: the networks are feeding us this slop because its cheap to produce. It's the networks that are controlling this and they are feeding us this stuff but the truth of the matter, if you study it in any depth, is that networks absolutely want to give people what they want so that will watch the shows. If people wanted something different, they would get it. And the truth of the matter is that the shows that are on television, are on television because that's what people want. The majority of people in this country want to turn on a television and turn off their brain and that's what they get. And that's far more depressing than a conspiracy. Conspiracies are much more fun than the truth of the matter, which is that the vast majority of the public are pretty mindless most of the time. I think the school situation has a parallel here when it comes to technology. It is so much more hopeful to think that technology can solve the problems that are more human and more organizational and more political in nature, and it ain't so. We need to attack these things at the root, which is people and how much freedom we give people, the competition that will attract the best people. Unfortunately, there are side effects, like pushing out a lot of 46 year old teachers who lost their spirit fifteen years ago and shouldn't be teaching anymore. I feel very strongly about this. I wish it was as simple as giving it over to the computer.
I can't speak for everywhere, of course, but my parents absolutely had a choice as to who would teach their children.
My job as a parent is to protect my kids. At all costs. Riling the feathers of a self-important teacher is of no concern. This is my blood that we're talking about.
You're right. But also consider that the current economy does not support this level of professionalism in teachers. Any teacher who can do a fantastic job meeting all of the expectations of students, teachers and administrators is smart enough to make 2x, 3x or more money in another profession with less stress.
I actually enjoy teaching more than programming and it's a better fit for me. But I choose programming because I can make 3x the money with half the effort. I'm not stressed out and I can pay the bills.
So keep that in mind the next time you confront a teacher. Even though you may technically be right, if you make their job harder, you may push them away from teaching. Remember, they could be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or some other type of professional. We want to encourage highly intelligent and highly educated people to remain teachers, and if you give teachers a hard time, the only ones that will stick around are those who aren't able to find other jobs. Which aren't the kind of teachers you want.
I'm not in the habit of confronting people, teachers least of all. I don't think it's productive most of the time. My point was simply about priorities. My son is a gorgeous, brilliant, quick-witted, hard-headed and strong-willed story-teller, liar, teller of jokes and fan of Pokemon. He's 4 years old. I love him more than myself, and I will do what I can to make his childhood fantastic. That imperative eclipses any concerns about the authority and sentiments of the education professionals in whose case I entrust him.
My point about the economy is that you want the market forces to encourage intelligent people to become teachers. Otherwise, you can get into a dangerous positive feedback loop of uneducated people teaching the next generation. If you make teaching a lousy job by underpaying teachers and treating them poorly, then why would intelligent people who have other career opportunities stick around?
I'm not saying teachers are infallible. Of course there are limits, but if you think you're "protecting" your kinds by shielding them from their consequences at all costs, I feel sorry for your children and I really hope that I don't have one of your kids in my class.
I wouldn't view my job as a parent being to protect my child. Rather, it's to make my child the best person I can.
Sometimes that might involve letting them try something and fail, and possibly get hurt... in which case it's my role to make sure they don't take on something which might seriously hurt them. Or punishing them when they've done something wrong.
Also, your job as a parent is only to protect your children from things they can not protect themselves against - and to eventually empower/teach/train them to be able to protect themselves. If you hover over them all the time they will, as the article said, end up 25 and still in your house. For instance, if the child got a 79 on an assignment...tough; it was within his power to get an A if he worked hard enough. If he is somehow being targeted by a malicious mean teacher and purposefully given a low grade...tough as well. In reality, it won't affect his chances at a happy and successfully life. Plus, life is not fair and he will meet people like that in real life that he will have to learn to deal with when you are dead and gone. It too is a learning lesson - and nothing you need to protect him against.
In almost all countries of the world, school attendance is compulsory for certain age ranges in default of government-approved alternatives. Perhaps the author of the grandparent comment acquiesces to children attending school more than being actively "willing" to have the children in school. In any event, the statement is correct that it is a parent's responsibility to protect minor children, and that includes protecting children from haughty teachers who are unwilling to allow parents to have the power to shop, the power to CHOOSE teachers as readily as parents choose grocers, physicians, community sports coaches, and other adults who influence children's lives.
AFTER EDIT: This addition to this comment was posted only after the back-and-forth below (to the "great-grandchild" comment level) about the unchanged original version of this comment above. Let me be clear: a lot of the zero-sum head-butting between teachers and parents would go away if only the system were changed so that parents of minor learners have greatly expanded choice in where their children go to school at public expense. Currently, the public policy position of most schoolteacher labor unions in most countries is that school attendance should be compulsory, that schooling should mostly be provided by government agencies, and that learners should be assigned to schools rather than have a wide choice of schools. All of those public policy positions entrench union leaders in political power, but none treat schoolteachers as professionals. Services that are CHOSEN by clients are largely appreciated by clients. Indeed, in the United States even a food stamp recipient doesn't tell off a grocer, because even shoppers who obtain a public subsidy for what they buy are still accorded the basic dignity of being able to choose where they take their business. Not all teachers are a good fit for all learners, no matter how fine the teacher (and no matter how dedicated the learner). It's best for everyone, and promotes more respect for teachers as professionals, to put learners at liberty to shop around for the learning situations that fit them best. The international examples I've read about (particularly the Netherlands) strongly suggest that teachers, learners, and taxpayers all benefit from having more rather than less choice.
http://www.amazon.com/Contrasting-Models-State-School-Compar...
Of course you are free to choose a school for your child. But don't tell me you know my job better than I do.
One of the neglected benefits of school choice for teachers is that parents who don't see eye-to-eye with a teacher, perhaps because of background the parents have gained in their own educations, can simply take their business elsewhere. Meanwhile, parents who are at liberty to shop for the best match for their children are all the more likely to appreciate the thoughtful work of the teachers who fit their children best.
Of course there are bad teachers, just like in any other profession. But I'd like to think that I'm not one, and on the off-chance that you'd have a kid on those rare occasions when I teach something, I'd hope that your presumption is that I'm a competent individual, unless confronted with evidence to the contrary. (And your child scoring low on a test is not.)
I think that teachers need some pushback but I think that the context and the subject are also important. I am not going to fight for grades, but if a teacher is unwilling/unequipped to handle the individual personalities/quirks of kids with professionalism and grace then I will fight back
However, those kids are viewed as an extension of themselves and so any attack on the kids is an attack on them. if you say that the kid has behavioral problems, what the parent hears is that they are a bad parent/person. They don't care about the kid, they care about how it reflects on them. This is the same reason that you have parents beating up and murdering hockey coaches and referees when they pull their kid. In the mind of the parent, the call is against them.
We have moved from a society were the entire village raised the kids and parents had the support, training, and coaching they needed. They were raised in an environment in which kids were actually cared for and that was passed onto new parents. Today, we move away from home, most of us don't have contact with parents, grandparents, siblings, etc and we raise kids because they either make us look good or it is simply the expected thing to do. Unfortunately, they don't actually have any understanding of how to raise kids and they are too busy to do a proper job anyway.
I am a firm believer that we are getting very close to the day when we will have to issue licences before people are allowed to have kids. Not that we should police who has them, but to ensure that people have the needed support systems and knowledge in place before trying to be parents.
I don't want my child to view their teacher as an authority figure who cannot be questioned and cannot make a mistake.
I'm not going to deliberately undermine the teacher, and I'll certainly give full consideration to their arguments, but if I wind up disagreeing with them then I'm not going to pretend that I believe my child was in the wrong just for the sake of maintaining the teacher's authority.
> One of my biggest pet peeves is when I tell a mom something her son did and she turns, looks at him and asks, "Is that true?" Well, of course it's true. I just told you.
"Is that true?" is a confrontational way of saying it... but what's wrong with getting the other side of the story? I should just assume that you were right? Even assuming that you were telling the truth as you saw it, that doesn't mean you're not wrong.
I have a boss at work who I respect. However, if he throws a mysql query on the board with an error you bet I'll point it out right to his face. It is human to err, and he does it to. But the attitudes of parents described in this article indicates that they do not expect their kids to respect their teachers. This would sort of be like my boss asking me to do something and me saying no. Except in very odd circumstances, this behaviour would be totally inappropriate on my part.
I would expect my children to treat teachers with respect. Of course they may occasionally question the accuracy of a teacher's statements but the teacher is in charge in the classroom; I would expect my child to understand that and I would never demean a teacher's authority in front of my child.
Erm, I think this rather misses the point completely. The point is not that teachers are perfect and don't make mistakes-- of course they aren't. The point is that teachers used to be invested with vocational authority.
In certain Asian cultures, children stand up when the teacher or sensei enters the classroom, and his authority is not questionable by a child. In America especially, the vocation of teacher has been denigrated so much now that they are often viewed as glorified nannies or babysitters.
I don't blame young people for avoiding the profession altogether in today's milieu in the West. There are certainly far more remunerative and respectable things to do with your life, which is a shame because teaching the next generation can be very rewarding.
My wife grew up in one of those cultures, and she observes that that cultural attitude allowed a lot of petty tyranny on the part of teachers. She much prefers the attitude in the United States that teachers have to earn their respect. She is a teacher by occupation--a private piano teacher--and she can meet the expectations of demanding clients. I am a teacher also--a teacher of optional group classes in advanced mathematics for young learners--and I would be ashamed to have to insist on respect before I have earned that respect.
I suspect that we have fundamental disconnect between us on the bounds of authority in education. However...
> his authority is not questionable by a child
Sure, a child should behave respectfully towards their teacher, and shouldn't test the bounds of the teacher's authority without reason. But it's a conditional relationship. If the teacher fails on their end, the child is not required to continue to uphold their end.
I agree with a lot of things the article says. He provides a lot of examples of parents doing legitimately stupid things, and entering into an adversarial relationship with a teacher without reason. I just take issue with the one or two bits where he asks that parents automatically take his word. Sending your child the message that you will always trust an arbitrary authority figure without even considering their side of the story? That's dumb.
Which is a rather dangerous attitude, I think, to entrench in a child. It is a cultural difference (obviously, as I'm an American) but an important one that I value: free-spirited individuality does not do well when one unquestionably bends.
One of the most admirable traits of the American education system is, in my mind, that it teaches disrespect of authority and the system, even if half the time it is by the accident of incompetence.
I'm imagining someone rebutting with talk of the Pledge of Allegiance in the schools. In my mind that is a perfect example: I don't know about you, but enough talk was given to that _you did not have to say it if you didn't want to_ that it was in fact an abject lesson in _choosing to conform._ Those who pointedly did not faced some amount of ridicule learned how to earn their independence, that it was not free and would not make them popular.
In the end the message I received from the topic of the Pledge was 1) you are free to choose to acknowledge the authority of the flag, and 2) the cost of exercising that freedom is high. These two unrelenting and possibly harsh truths have served me well.
We teach our intellectuals and outsiders how to take the strength of nonconformity for themselves.
There is also a difference between questioning the teacher as a person versus questioning the material he teaches. The students may not agree with some of the material, but most of the time the teacher is someone who's underpaid, and works way too hard to try to give them knowledge to give them a better life and to help them succeed, often times to lift them out of a life of poverty and low skilled labor. You can question his methods, his material, but to question his intentions can be going too far.
"If your child said something happened in the classroom that concerns you, ask to meet with the teacher and approach the situation by saying, 'I wanted to let you know something my child said took place in your class, because I know that children can exaggerate and that there are always two sides to every story. I was hoping you could shed some light for me.'"
It infuriates me that the author implies that only kids can exaggerate, bend the truth, or lie. Apparently there's more than one side to every story only when the first side isn't the teacher's.
Sure, there's some great teachers, but there's also a large number who garner poor results year after year and are never fired. The problems of offensive parents and unruly medicated children are obviously pervasive.
The article doesn't even touch on why, with huge unemployment, and massively expensive college costs, children might as well give up hope of using education to attain the standard of living their parents were able to attain.
Further, being uneducated is a nice way to assure you'll have a hard job life.
At least being educated gives you some ability to get ahead.
2. "If your child said something happened..." [the parent should acknowledge] "that there are always two sides to every story..."
Ok, parents complicate and often undermine education. Still, a little consistency would be nice.
Not because the parents are right but above all never talk negatively about the teacher to the child and because I say so it is true shows an entitlement issue on the part of the teacher (bordering on the nacisistic).
Respect is earned and if someone is completely unable to get respect when he has to actually answer for what he has done he doesn't dserve the respect in the first place.
I have had amazing teachers I have had teachers who were bad and techers who were inbetween. All of them have been wrong on occasion (no surprise, they are human after all) but the only ones I ever lost respect for were does who didn't admit it (or those who blamed their students).
Kids are smarter than you think.
And it is true, respect is earned - for people; but not position. I respected very few of my teachers individually. However I respected the office that any one of them held and I gave respect to all of them no matter if I respected them as a person or not. This is both right and wise.
All it takes is one parent to accuse them of sexual harassment and their careers are forever tainted. Not saying all contact is fair game, but a teacher putting their arm around a child who has been hurt should not be damaging to their career. The power balance is entirely out of whack.
Later the teacher spent days in jail.