There's been some excellent commentary about education in the blogosphere in the past week. Harry writes about the problems with parent-teacher homework agreements. Lisa follows up on our discussion and writes about methods for parents to become more involved in their school, with a comment from me. BitchPhD writes that her son's teacher steps over the line and involves herself in family business. The comments on her post were also interesting as some felt that school wasn't challenging enough and others thought there was too much pressure on kids. Tim Burke sees an underlying political agenda in the debates about homework. And Professing Mama found her parent-teacher conference a wonderful experience.
With Jonah is now in 2nd grade, I've had three years of experiencing public schools from a parent perspective. After years of analyzing abstract studies and debating political theory around education, here I am in the middle of it as a participant. Rude awakening.
Two separate issues keep coming up around here: challenging kids and involving parents.
As we were waiting for the elementary school to pull up last week, Helen strolled up to retrieve her younger sister from the bus. Helen is the big girl of the block, a freshman in high school. Tall, pretty, and smart. We're all proud of her for winning the big middle school award last year and take it as a matter of pride that she lives on our block. "How's it going, Helen?" "OK, except for homework." She explained that she spends six hours on homework every night, because she's in the honors classes. Her mom later told me that her guidance counselor told her that she shouldn't be friends with non-honor student kids, because they will drag her down.
A couple of weeks ago, Jonah told me that his teacher yelled at him for going ahead in his math workbook. I had been meaning to set up a meeting with his teacher anyway, but that little bit of information pushed me to get things going.
Ms. W. turned out to be warmer than I thought she was going to be, though she definitely had a strong perspective on her role as a teacher. She explained that she couldn't have kids go ahead because she said that sometimes kids think that they know what they're doing and they really don't. That made sense to me. She couldn't let kids do separate work, because she really had to make sure that they knew the basics to pass the big statewide test in the spring. She didn't think that kids should get much homework in second grade because they will be getting so much later in their school career.
In short, Jonah wasn't going to get challenged in this class. That might have bothered me a couple of years ago, but I've reduced my expectations. Jonah has a lot of other lessons to learn like how to keep his silliness in check and how to write neatly. If the school does that, that's a good thing, too. Besides, he'll be that kid with 6 hours of homework in a few years, so we'll give him a few more years to coast. We'll challenge him in our own unstructured, random way at home. If he wants more math work, then we'll do more of that here. I just have to keep tabs on what goes on in school and make up for deficits at home.
The biggest problem that I have with the public schools system is their disdain for parents. Since the face of the parent at the school is usually female, ultimately it feels a whole lot like sexism to me. Parents should have more control over their schools. More say in the day to day operation. More opportunities to witness their kids in action, especially in the younger grades. Arrangement also need to consider the vast number of families with two full-time employed parents. Education schools need to offer classes on parent-teacher partnerships. Parents are the ultimate guardians of their kids, and they shouldn't be shut out of the process. Those that afford it are going to opt out.
