Irate Parents

      Now here's a topic that just flat out confuses me.  Typically, the way this works is a student gets a failing grade and the parent goes after the teacher.  Or a student is given some kind of consequence for inappropriate behavior and the parent goes after the principal.  And when I say "goes after," I mean full force yelling, finger wagging, swearing, threatening, you name it.  I once had a parent tell me that I was her slave and she was my master and she was going to "get" me.  What makes people think that it's OK to behave that way?  If their child got sick, would they blame the doctor?  I can just see it.  "Listen, doc, I don't like the way you diagnosed my kid. I can't believe you used that cold metal stethoscope on him.  If it weren't for your idiotic methods, my child would be completely healthy."  First of all, people don't treat doctors like that  and, secondly, if a parent actually felt that way, he'd just take his kid to a different doctor.  Furthermore, if a child gets a failing grade in school, shouldn't the parents try to find out what the child did (or, more likely, didn't do) to get that failing grade?  Shouldn't the parents be asking the teacher what can be done on the home front to help the kid pass?  And as for school discipline, I've heard every excuse ever invented.  And I'm not talking about the excuses the kids give (I expect that from kids), I'm talking about the excuses their parents give!  I wouldn't go into your home and discipline your child, but when they are in school, I legally act in loco parentis (in absence of parents).  You might be mad at your kid for cheating on that test, but why would you be mad at me for enforcing the ensuing consequence?  The disciplining we do in school is part of the educational process.  We teach them how to read, write, and compute, and these days we have to teach them how to behave like rational human beings as well. When a nasty parent comes in and yells at me I want to say to the student, "See?  That's what I'm talking about. Don't be a jerk like your dad."

Everything Changes, Doesn't It?

 

I came across an article in my MASSP Weblines this morning about preparing students for the future; and I quote, "What we soon realized was that we cannot predict the future and that we are preparing many of our students for jobs that may not even exist."  Really?! Are they just now discovering this startling revelation? The high school I attended in 1968 went through a phase of believing they needed to prepare us all to be astronauts because we'd be zooming around from planet to planet as adults. And as a young teacher, I witnessed home economics programs going by the wayside because women would have fancy electronic gadgets to do the cooking and cleaning and wouldn't need to know how to do those things in the future.  I'm not saying we shouldn't teach aerospace engineering or that we should bring back home ec., but, obviously, we're not all engaged in interplanetary travel, and even though we have fancy electronic gadgets, we still have to cook and clean.  

According to the Weblines article, within ten years we won't have desks, or paper, or homework, or parent/teacher conferences, or even school buildings. We won't need computers, school lunch, books, or lockers.  But we will need a website and we can have the students design it.  Let me just say, OMG!  I can't even tell you what ended up on our school website during the five minutes we gave students access to editing it. Just the fact that we've had schools with desks, paper, books, and homework since the 17th century leads me to believe that we'll still have all that ten years from now.

But since we can't predict the future and we don't know what skills they will need in the future, how DO we prepare students for the future?  We do what we've been doing well for hundreds of years; teach them to read, write, and calculate.  Teach them how to think in depth about any topic and teach them how to learn anything they need to learn. We have to refuse to dumb it down or pretend that as long as they have Google, they don't need school. It's absolutely true that the internet has made information readily available to everyone everywhere, but information alone doesn't do our thinking for us. The most important thing we can do for the education of our young people right now is to make sure they have great teachers. All the educational reforms in the world can't take the place of great teachers any more than revamping the foster home system can take the place of good parenting.