Hey, Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alone
Last month’s mail included a letter from a discouraged middle-school principal, complaining about parents with screwed-up priorities. “When the parents emphasize appearance rather than health and value a basketball win more highly than an academic accomplishment, the kids lose - big time.”
Principal “X’s” letter was prompted by a recent phone call from an irate mother threatening to sue her, two lunchroom supervisors (teachers) and the entire schoolboard for interfering with her daughter, Suzy-Q’s, right to privacy.
In other words, Suzy-Q’s constitutional right to starve was being challenged.
It seems that a couple of weeks after Christmas break, teachers noted that Suzy-Q had stopped eating lunch. Soon the faculty, one by one, began bringing her listlessness and plummeting grades to the attention of Principal X who felt a phone call to Suzy-Q’s mother was in order.
The rest is history. Suzy-Q, the principal was informed by a surprisingly unappreciative mother, puts on weight if she eats more than one light meal a day so she has put herself on a diet.
Being of the old school (the one that says growing kids need well-balanced nourishing meals), Principal X suggested that maybe - just maybe - the mother ought to interfere since SuzyQ seemed to be fading fast - physically and academically.
Mother exploded all over principal, faculty and anyone else even remotely associated with the school. Her daughter, she insisted, had the right to make her own decisions without a bunch of busybodies butting in. “My daughter wants to be a model and,” she reminded Principal X, “she’s not a child - she’s 13.”
Makes one wonder if the mother is much older - mentally.
“I’ve been in the education business for over thirty years,” the principal continues, “and I have watched the responsibilities of the family slowly being shifted onto the shoulders of teachers and administrators, and yet when we attempt to intervene we’re told to butt out.”
A teacher in North Carolina writes: “How am I supposed to teach math to kids who have had too little sleep and too much Mountain Dew instead of breakfast? And why must I be the one to teach them that belching and passing gas in the classroom are not olympic events?”
A friend who teaches in a nearby private school uses irony to get her message to the parents. “A big thank you to the parents (all seven of them),” she wrote in her monthly newsletter, “who came to our Quiz Bowl tournament. For the information of the missing 33, your kids won!”
In her November newsletter she offered some suggestions for students’ Christmas presents. “How about some books instead of computer war games like the one where the player is a pilot whose only goal is to massacre the ground troops?
“How much hand/eye coordination do our kids need, anyway?” she huffs in response to the students (and parents) who use this as justification for shelling out big bucks on computer games. “Are they all going to be fighter pilots?”
The transferral of parental responsibility onto the shoulders of educators is frequently the topic of discussion among my colleagues. Invariably the question is, “How am I supposed to teach history and manners in 42 minutes?”
My question is: Who’s supposed to be minding the store? xxxx