Max Sawicky wrote:
>Ms. K:
it would be miss kelley in these here parts. you are below the mason-dixon line, right?
>I'm surprized nobody else blew up at my remarks about
>parents. Guess few bothered to read.
oh max, honeypie, i read and i was peeved as all get out. but you charm me so most o' the rest o' the time with your self-deprecating humor that i let you off the hook. 'sides you play such a modest role in the decision-making!
I have a few
>friends who were in the Movement w/me from wa-a-ay
>back and went into teaching out of idealism, and who
>report to me the disinterest of parents. I did say
>lack of parental involvement had some 'good and bad'
>reasons, and my source is anecdotal, but with these
>caveats I'll stand by my remarks absent a reason not to.
would ya ask 'em why it's necessary to take out a small tree per child during the first week of school? i get a headache with all the reading i gotta do!
you have to look at the structural location of teachers and take what they say with a grain of salt and a pinch of an institutional/structural analysis. they're caught between the admin & the students/parents. much easier to blame parents for their lack of involvement than it is to fight the admin, eh? the school system depends on the invisible unpaid work of parents to pick up the slack. and that's falling apart for all kinds of reasons. teachers are asked to teach kids how to tie shoes, how to name their emotions and have the proper kinds of emotion no less. burdened by increasing demands from the public "stakeholeders," demands from the admin. and their efforts at deprofessionalization, demands from what they see as unruly children, as well as their tarnished idealism, etc parents are easy targets. [HIC has some insights here too]
yet, for decades, schools/teachers have demanded that they're the one's who 'know' how to teach and can do it best. teacher's also want to maintain a sense of professional dignity, to say they know something that others can't know or would have trouble knowing for lack of time, knowledge, and so forth. their professional status, in part, defines parents as not knowledgeable. that's what a profession is: a monopoly on knowledge.
not blaming teachers or parents here, but pointing out that schooling is still structured as if the two parent nuclear family is operative and this is no longer the case. as a society, we have turned to the schools to solve all kinds of problems, problems that they gladly said they could solve. it's no wonder teachers are overburdened and beleaguered. i mean, this *is* the conundrum of pursuing liberal policies that suggest that schools can solve all [or, at least, most] social problems: drugs, crime, teen pregnancy, VD, poverty, our lost 'moral compass', racism, sexism, violence, you name it. schools have been seen as the magic mystery oil you stick in the gas tank.
a few students of mine have done qualitative research on this topic, so perhaps more systematically anecdotal. also, i think sari biklen wrote an historical/ethnographic account of teaching as a profession, mostly dealing with gender, but as i recall she addresses this issue as to why teachers see parents as the enemy in some ways. [likewise, parents see teachers as the enemy as well]. and i'm fairly certain that jerry's _teaching in american_ addresses the topic, though i've not read it.
>Data on this could persuade me
>otherwise.
no doubt.....
coz you is too easy max baby.
kelley