Parents and Schools



I have to admit: When I first started teaching, nothing scared me more than parents.

When you are 21, fresh out of college, and in your first classroom, you know how little you know and you spend 90% of your time trying to hide it. I used to think to myself all the time my first year of teaching, "If my child is ever in the classroom of a first year teacher, I will do whatever it takes to get them out. Their whole year will be wasted." When I think back on that year, I can't believe every single parent didn't call the school to get their kids removed from my care.

It's not that I was abusive or mean or (completely) scattered... it's just that there were so many who were BETTER than me! I tried things and failed 3 or 4 times a week, even day. Who would want that for their child?

Recently I was speaking to a friend whose husband is in med.school. I asked her, do they tell the patients that they are not doctors, but doctors in training before they help with a diagnosis or even a surgery? Her response: The patients don't even notice or ask.

This really took me aback! They didn't notice?! How could they not? This person had very limited experience outside of a classroom, a book, or an observation. How could they not tell the difference between a seasoned veteran mentor and a young, naive intern?

Maybe it's the lab coat. Teachers don't wear lab coats, but let's face it, we can be spotted from 4 miles away when we head to the grocery store after work still wearing our "crazy socks" from Spirit Day. We have chalk dust or markers coating us. We give "the look" to innocent children in Walmart. We LOOK like teachers, so maybe parents don't notice new teachers anymore than patients notice interns.

I'm not afraid of parents anymore. Not even a little. I don't get that sick feeling when I'm paged from the office with a call and I don't have nervous dreams the night before the parent workshops I host as part of my position as a gifted resource teacher. I imagined the worst from these parents, but have been pleasantly surprised how a forging a relationship with the parents has truly improved my interactions with their children.

For example, yesterday a parent explained how useful rubrics are to her family. Her son tends to go completely overboard on projects, but having a rubric to break down criteria is helpful for him because parents and child know what the teacher expects.

Another parent shared her child's obsession with Taylor Swift. In a discussion about helping gifted children deal with failure, she decided to do some research about Taylor Swift and find out some difficulties she needed to overcome to get to where she is today. Upon sharing that, some other parents decided to do the same using athletes their children look up to as well.

A very knowledgeable and caring parent also shared how anxious she finds her child gets when asked "why" questions. She suspects he thinks the asker knows "why" and expects him to come up with the correct answer. Even if he MIGHT know, his fear of being wrong keeps him from answering the question. Instead, she tries to rephrase her "why" questions with "What do you think about..." to help him take the risk to answer a difficult question. I used this technique with him in the classroom today and was shocked by the sophistication of his response when I might previously have gotten a blank stare.

These parents KNOW their kids! They know them well, much better than I can in two 45 minute sessions a week. Their insight proves to be invaluable time and time again. Conversely, when all their children will say when asked about school is "It was fine." or "I don't know.", substantial conversations with someone from the school can be enlightening for parents as well.

In the words of Macaulay Calkin: "I'm not afraid anymore!"

Stress is a Choice

I believe that stress is a choice.

I have spent about 2/3 of my life quitting bad habits. I’ve gone from grinding my teeth to biting my nails and back again more times than I can count. I know that my bad habits crop up in times of stress and I attempt to quit them in times of relative peace.

In my second year of teaching I decided to keep a “stress calendar”. On every working day I rated my stress level from 1 (no pulse) to 10 (ready to be committed). Sometimes I forgot about it entirely and sometimes I got a bit of sick satisfaction from writing down an “8” or even a “9”. What I did not anticipate, however, was the amount of stress relief that calendar would bring me in my third year of teaching.

When I got to the end of my last staff meeting that first week of school in my third year, I checked my calendar. Last year I rated this day a “7”. Just reading that brought me down to a “5”. That day in October when I realized that my guided reading schedule, which looked so perfect in August, just simply wouldn’t work with this group of students should’ve been at least a “6”, but came down to a “4” when I realized that October never got below a “5” the year before. In December, when my family and my in-laws started competing for holiday time and my kids were bouncing off the walls, I didn’t even need to look at my calendar.

Now, in my sixth year of teaching, I never look at that calendar. I don’t need to because I realized that stress is a choice. There are ebbs and flows to the amount of stress I suffer from in my personal and professional life. I can choose to be stressed or I can choose to be calm. The things that I cannot control will not change no matter how stressed I am and the things that matter now will most likely be distant memories before I know it.

I believe that stress is a choice.

Single White Female

I have always been what I affectionately refer to as a "psuedo feminist". My fiancee calls it my "bleeding heart". I do not consider myself a liberal or a democrat, but I am certainly not conservative or a republican. I am also not apolitical. I think I simply believe in the inherent good inside myself and others and rarely, if ever, feel like particular groups or rights should be excluded.

Therefore, it always burned me a bit that I knew in my heart and soul that I would become a teacher. I knew about the critical shortage of women in math and science careers (alas, my two worst subjects). I also knew that caucasion females are not exactly in short supply in schools today. When I saw this modern-day Rosie the Rivetor magazine cover, I was still in the early stages of my career and was shamed when I looked around and saw 2 dozen faces just like mine leading the classrooms in my school, but only about 6-8 students participating in the lessons who fit the "caucasion female" bill.

Why is it that caucasion females are attracted to elementary schools? Is it because this was a happy, safe place for us in our youth? Or maybe it's because OUR teachers were caucasion females, successful and secure women we looked up to?

By those standards, there are few students in my current school who can relate to me, at least on the surface level. It is a struggle to remember that all kids do not learn they way I learned... that is, exactly as my traditional teachers taught me. This country has a major problem: a plumetting national reputation and "failing" subgroups barring us from federal funding.

Can our predominantly caucasion female workforce solve this problem? Honestly, I think so.

Rosie is the symbol I chose here because women have a history of righting the wrongs of society. In general, women are empathetic and motivated (at least those of us who chose to go into teaching tend to be). What better qualities could there be to right the current wrongs of our schools?

Our schools are designed to educate as many people as possible as similarly as possible. Is this really the best plan in this day and age? If we are truly leaving "no child behind", then we ought to start teaching as many people as possible as effectively as possible.