Parents and Teachers, Teachers and Parents

My news feed was blowing up last night with people posting this CNN article, so before you read my musings, check it out if you haven't already:

What Teachers Really Want to Tell Parents

I don't know that I have a ton to add, but I really agree with a lot of what he's saying. And unfortunately, I've had to deal with most of the situations he writes about. I resigned from my school of four years for a myriad of reasons (which I won't air here), but parental issues were definitely a contributing factor.

EXCUSES: Parents are full of them. I understand the need to protect a child, I really do. However, not allowing students to take responsibility for their own actions is NOT helping them. They will grow up thinking someone is always going to bail them out for mistakes and wrong choices. I can't even begin to count how many parental excuses I've heard. My favorite is when a child would get in trouble for not being able to keep his hands to himself and it was always another child's fault. Then I get to explain ever so nicely, how the first child is actually the instigator the majority of the time. UGH.

PROSECUTOR: These were my least favorite parent interactions. The parent whose child accused me of telling her to "get your a** in line." The parent whose child accused me of "bullying" her, then told the mom not to say anything. The parent, seriously misinformed, who emailed the district office and told them I "lost" her child and didn't know where he was. The parent who claimed his child was being bullied by other students, even though it was the other way around. I could go on and on and on.

EGGSHELLS: Honestly, I wasn't too happy when parents came to visit during the school day. Most of them didn't want to help, they just wanted to sit and stare and point out things that the other students were doing wrong. Talk about walking on eggshells! I'm a nervous person anyway, so that didn't really help much.

The bottom line is, teachers teach because we WANT to. We are not out to "get" your student. We want to teach them as much as we can, without being torn apart for every decision we make. It makes me cringe when I see acquaintances on Facebook complaining about their child's teacher. If they even had an inkling of what that teacher goes through in a normal day, they would think twice about airing their grievances-- at least I hope they would.

I didn't really mean to unload like this, but I applaud Ron Clark for having the courage to speak out about this. And for giving me the courage too!

Teachers? Thoughts?