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Children need lessons in respect
By LEE KUCERA
One of my best friends teaches high school in an upscale suburb outside Seattle, not unlike Silicon Valley: The area's professional population is employed in the high-tech industry; kids live in luxurious homes; and parents are, shall we say, very interested in their children's report cards.
When a substitute teacher covered one of her classes recently, my friend learned--through a note from the sub and the students themselves--that the class had been rowdy, rude, and uncooperative. She works every day to instill in her students the concept of respect, and was dismayed that they had savaged a substitute teacher in her absence. So she gave each of them, as homework, the task of writing 50 times, "I will be respectful to substitute teachers in my classes," and required a parent's signature on the completed paper. "I thought," she said ruefully, "that they would do what I would do in that situation--sit my kid down and talk to him about behavior."
Welcome to parenting in the year 2000. Six parents called her to complain about the assignment. One--apparently clairvoyant--said, "I know my son had nothing to do with this. He's never been in any trouble." Two spoke to the principal. Moreover, it was clear that the "parents' network" had been as busy as bees on the telephone supporting each other, defending their offspring, assuring each other that their kids hadn't done anything wrong--it must have been somebody else's--and that their children shouldn't have to be wasting their valuable time on a meaningless busywork assignment. One wrote a disdainful note in reply: "My daughter has real homework to worry about. I excuse her from doing this assignment."
Geez. I can remember my Depression-era Dad telling us at the dinner table that if we ever got in any trouble at school, we were in twice as much trouble when we got home. Today, by contrast--at least in affluent communities like Cupertino--traditional parental interest in their kids' schools has segued into the presumption that they have dominion over everything that happens there. It's just business as usual for schools to field ongoing calls from parents who complain about teachers, criticize the curriculum, challenge test grades, override disciplinary measures, micro-manage daily homework, transfer a kid from classes where he's unhappy, and bring the administration to its knees over any debatable issue.
Obviously we need to keep in touch with what's going on at our kids' schools, and intervene if there is a real injustice--as I did once, when one of my kids' teachers used the word "plagiarism" in the critique of an assignment. But maybe the best way to foster a child's success in school is to do our job as parents. What if each of us sent to school kids who had been taught at home to be academically curious, to enjoy reading, to use good manners, to give their best effort to a task, to understand that sometimes life isn't fair, to take responsibility for their actions, and to know that they are valued whether they make straight A's or not?
In the first place, teachers would feel as if they had landed in nirvana rather than the classroom from hell like my incredulous friend. More important, kids would have a much stronger basis for long-range academic success than they do when their parents take control of every detail of their lives at school.
We can't pick up a newspaper without reading about the problems and failures in California education. The proposed solutions almost invariably focus on more standardized testing and teacher accountability. Maybe we should try shifting the paradigm back a few decades to a vanishing concept: teachers, not students, are in charge of our classrooms, and parents should support their jurisdiction there.
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Cupertino, California Since 1947
