You know what? You may not like this, but those are exactly the sort of things my father says when comparing his generation to mine, or my daughter's.
I believe it! You can go back to Socrates' day and read the same kinds of things.
You don't have to go that far. You can read them in Fielding's Joseph Andrews, which, for my money, was a lot more entertaining than Socrates.
It would be too much, but I wish I could post, verbatim, the letter I got from a parent whose precious daughter I caught cheating on a quiz (it was blatant). If I have time later, I will try to unearth some nuggets (yes, I saved it).
The next year the girl, now in a non-superintendent's class, inveighed against a teacher using the f-word. The result? Well, since mommy determined that the problem originated with the teacher, the girl's class was changed so that he was no longer her teacher for that subject. To what class, you ask? Why, the superintendent's class, of course. (And, no, this was not a budding, misunderstood Einstein.)
The one thing I can say for my high poverty, low achievement, many many IEPs in a room school...is that I don't hear this from parents. If I call a parent, they at least seem to take it seriously and say things like "we don't play" and "there's no reason for them to be doing anything other than what they're told during classtime."
I do get requests for their child to be near the front, right next to me...and I explain that I can't really have 10 kids all right next to me and that the kids that can't see (lose their glasses, don't get glasses when they need them, etc) sort of have highest priority.
Now if only these calls home were followed by changes in behavior that were either noticeable or lasted more than a class period or two.
Here's something I always give new teachers:
http://nyceducator.com/2009/09/s...artup-
tips.html
I not only printed that out for myself at the beginning of the year, I made an extra copy for the also new teacher in the building when we were sharing phone calls for a certain class.
Favorite response from a grandmother: Oh, you can believe he's going to be getting a WHOLE LOT of good advice from me!"
Both of us thank you!
I love that response, and I know exactly what it means.
You're very welcome.
Have you ever met a grandma who "plays," so to speak, when it comes to behaving in school? I bet you haven't. I love grandmas.
While reading To Kill A Mockingbird, one of the students asked why there were so many kids in the first grade who were held back (Scout's description of her classroom). I replied that back in the day, students who didn't learn the material weren't allowed to move on to the next grade and that if a teacher thought a kid shouldn't be moved on, the parents went along with it. *crickets* and stunned looks.
You would have thought I said "back in the day aliens landed and ate all their brains"... none could believe it.
Commenting by HaloScan
