Dear Pearl: Thanks for your recent Dear Teacher piece in the Tribune. Far too often we teachers don`t hear from our students` parents. But despite your ”identity crisis” and the misery you say your kids` teachers are causing you, I hope you are involved in and care about your kids` education. Most studies I`ve heard about indicate that the better schools have the most parental involvement.
That doesn`t mean you should have to go to school again. Between you and me, once is enough for anybody. So rest assured that some of us tell your kids to do their own homework. In fact, I insist on it.
I even encourage them to help with the housework. That way you can get the paper read in the evening, and they`d understand responsibility at school.
Anyway, as you say, when you went to school, you ”learned to mind the teachers and (your) parents, who gave (you), generally, the same messages about respect for authority and what school was all about: learning.” Sadly, that`s not always the case now. Just this year students have called me names that you don`t hear in polite company (when you can find it) or read in family newspapers.
For example, a student I had politely asked to return a girl`s purse he was rifling through, despite her protests, told me, ”Get out of my face,
(obscenity deleted).” I asked him to come to the office. He refused. I wrote a discipline referral. Minutes later, I saw the student, who was in school by court order to audit classes, and told him the assistant principal was looking for him. He retorted with a racial slur and walked off.
My face turned from off-white to deep red. I learned how to deal with people like that as a turnkey in one of the last red-line brigs in the South Pacific in the late `50s and early `60s. But our school has a policy against corporal punishment and the tactics I learned in a Marine Corps brig.
Granted, that wasn`t one of your kids and isn`t exactly representative of kids today. But just a month or so ago, I was at a journalism conference in Washington, D.C., with some students and then went on with another group to Estonia and Russia because I believe such trips are educational and beneficial.
The first day I was gone, one of my classroom students told the substitute she didn`t have to do anything and called her a crude name. The student`s mother came in and told the assistant principal that her daughter shouldn`t be suspended for that.
When I went to high school, I was once suspended three days for skipping school. My father not only agreed with the punishment but added to it by getting me out of bed at 6 a.m. each day and dumping me out along a fence row he wanted cut.
But you do make some interesting points. For you to imply, however, that putting on plays and taking field trips are not educationally beneficial and that today`s students haven`t learned ”how to write good sentences . . . and how to make use of the public library” is misleading and wrong-headed, I think. Although I attended a small high school in southeastern Illinois, I was in plays and went on field trips. One of the highlights of my senior year was a trip our basketball team took to the NCAA tournament in Lexington, Ky. I learned much about how to cope with life on that trip.
And today`s students are taught about writing good sentences and how to use the library. You should take some time to read some of the student writing I see. I know many adults who couldn`t touch it for quality. Many times, though, today`s students are too tired from their part-time jobs or too hung over from last night`s party to be alert enough to learn anything.
So please, dear Pearl, while you`re busy being you, try to understand a teacher`s perspective. I don`t want you to go to school with your kids. Nor do I want you to look like them, act like them (particularly I don`t want you to act like them), intercede about grades or drive them anywhere.
What I would like for you to do is to raise your kids with some sense of responsibility, a degree of self-discipline and an awareness that the sun doesn`t rise and set solely for them. Then perhaps your children wouldn`t continue their perpetual adolescence, and you could get over your identity crisis.
