I respectfully submit that I think the tone of the letter is really condescending.
I teach 11-18 year olds and have in particular been a tutor for many years, which has included phone calls and meetings with parents (some quite lengthy!).
N.B. I am in the UK, which may affect things.
As others have said, it is good when parents get involved. It is also not useful to mention money. My (private) school charges between $20,000 and $40,000 per year. I know this and don’t need it mentioned, thank you.
Here are my views, interspersed with your letter:
Dear Teacher:
God’s blessings be with you and your family this Christmas season.
I am an atheist, so this is not helpful.
We wanted to write in regards to a number of concerns we had with Sophia’s education and intellectual growth. As she has progressed throughout the past half-year at School Name, we are troubled by a number of areas in which she has seemingly regressed. It is our fervent hope and desire that we will be able to address these concerns on a personal basis, both in talking to you and improving our abilities as parents. However, we have no desire to “sandbag” you with a list of concerns without your being aware of them prior to our meeting – hence this letter.
‘Fervent’ is a worrying word. Every parent is keen (and so are we teachers), but some are fanatical. As Rickjay says, keep it business-like.
Also the whole paragraph is far too long anyway. “We’d like to meet you to discuss Sophia’s progress.”
The first, and in our opinion, least important, is her regression in her math skills. Sophia entered school with a minor facility in addition: 2+2=4, 3+4=7, nothing more complicated than that: I do not believe that she understood the concept of subtraction, but she did understand addition.
However, this small ability is no longer evident in her. When asked an addition question she has taken up the habit of guessing along the number range: “2? 3? 4?..” every single time. This is puzzling, but we are aware that children can and will display signs of regression, where an ability once in display is no longer evident. And if this were the only issue in which we’ve noticed signs of regression, we would not be writing this letter.
A more troubling sign of regression is her newly-displayed habit of writing many of her letters and numbers backwards. From toddlerhood-onward, Sophia has always loved to draw and we have made it a priority that, since she does enjoy drawing, she should learn to “draw” (print) her letters and numbers (as well as properly hold a pencil), skills that she has worked on since the age of four and fully possessed in her fifth year.
Unfortunately, we have noticed an increasing likelihood in the past 4 months of her writing her letters and numbers backwards, an apparent display of dyslexia in a child that never shown a tendency towards this problem. As you can imagine, this is particularly vexing as we have believed and known that Sophia entered Kindergarten already possessing the skills and ability needed to begin writing out actual words.
However, the most disturbing sign of a lack of educational progress on Sophia’s part is her complete inability to phonetically parse out words. She obviously recognizes some words, but if you complement them with closely-spelled homonyms, she will literally guess what the following words are. For example, she recognizes the word “Cat”. However, if you give her the following list:
- Cat
- Mat
- Hat
- Sat
- Bat
She will only get the first word right, while guessing on the others. Her guesses always starts with the first letter (“Maybe?” “Maebh?” (a friend of hers) “Mackie?” (her puppy)), but come nowhere close to being correct.
This detailed information would be much better in a meeting. Summarise it: “We are concerned about her progress in Maths and Phonetics.”
This is especially bothersome to her father: Having been taught phonetically to read at the age of four, he is of the opinion that Sophia should at least be able to sound out this list of words and is upset not merely by her inability to do so but that she shows no understanding of the basic concept of sounding out. He has never been a proponent of the whole-language school of reading, believing that many of the concepts involved are more suited towards older children (such as deriving the meaning of a word from its use in a sentence). As English is based upon a phonetic alphabet, he feels that teaching children the phonetic basis of letters and letter-groupings is a far superior method of teaching basic reading skills, even with the number of exceptions (“bough” vs. “tough”) that exist in this language.
Sheesh. I realise you are keen to support your child, but this comes across as a fanatical father who knows far better than the professionals how to teach.
Is Sophia’s mother bothered? Why do you refer to yourself in the third person? “He has never been a proponent of the whole-language school of reading” - and doesn’t know how to write a summary either ! :eek:
I’d leave the whole of this out.
Our frustration and concern is not helped by the apparent daily use of a TV show in teaching literacy, the “Super Why!” programs available from PBS. To make sure there is no doubt to our position in this matter: We do not believe in the efficacy of Television to teach intellectual concepts, especially something as anti-TV as reading and literacy. The dichotomy between what is being taught and the methods used to teach it frankly boggles the mind: it would be akin to teaching music by mostly reading composer biographies. Television is more effective in teaching children social mores, “what is cool”, etc… but when it comes to actual learning, well, TV is useless.
Well you certainly have a strong view on TV! I could mention the UK Open University, where students can get a complete degree by watching course material on TV, but this whole paragraph suggest that nothing will change your mind.
If you wrote this to me, I would be thinking ‘Sounds like only home-schooling will be good enough for this guy’.
Leave this out.
As you know, the financial commitment to School Name is not inconsiderable – at least $700/month when extra-tuition activities and fees such as BAC, food, uniforms, fund-raising, and other items are added. We have made this sacrifice in the belief that not only does Sophia benefit morally from being in a parochial school, but also that the quality of education received is higher. We are beginning to question whether we are receiving value for our money – after all, we are paying for two schools: School Name and our local public school (through our property taxes).
Leave this out too.
It suggests that the school is poor value, that you are martyrs, that only certain schools instill morals and that the school is responsible for local education policy.
We would like to meet with you later this month, at a time of your choosing, so we can discuss these issues and what we can do to both assist our daughter in her education and ensure that the quality of education received during her time in school is the best possible. Feel free to call us at the above number to set up a time and date for our meeting.
“We would like to meet with you. Please feel free to contact us by phone, e-mail or lettere.”
Look, I realise you want the best for your child. But if a lengthy diatribe is the first thing your kid’s teacher gets, it sets the wrong tone.
Good luck.
glee summarized everything rather nicely, I think.
On a related note, glee, you have much to teach me about brevity!
IMHO,
- Probably, but not certainly. It’s kindergarten; I always thought its major purpose was to teach kids how to be in school, rather than to teach them actual things. The adjustment could be bigger than you realize, and it could be that learning how to take turns, stand in line, ask questions properly, interact with a classroom full of kids, and spend the day at school is taking more of Sophie’s mental energy than you think.
- Yes. Oh, yes. If I were your daughter’s teacher, I would dread meeting with you, because the letter makes you sound like a condescending jerk who thinks his daughter’s teachers are somehow unworthy. The formal tone of the letter sounds like something best reserved for the point at which you actually have decided to initiate legal action against the person to whom you are sending it.
- There’s no way to tell from your letter.
I’d write something short, sweet, and to the point (see Rickjay’s post). If the teacher thinks you’re working against her before you even meet with her, it’s going to be very difficult to establish meaningful communication or get her cooperation in helping your daughter, if she does end up needing help.
Thank you. 
No I don’t. 
glee: Great job. I agree with everything you said.
Put me in the “don’t send the letter” camp. I understand that you feel that you communicate better through writing, but writing things out has it’s downside when you are trying to be diplomatic and build a cooperative relationship with the teacher in the best interest of your kiddo (if that is what you are after rather than winning some sort of “I know the best educational method” debate). The tone of the letter, specifically the second half, comes off kinda hard. You may not have meant it that way, but since it is just words on paper, you can’t always communicate tone like you could in a face to face meeting. By all means, if you want to send the letter, send it (you are the parent!), but just be aware of the possible unintended consequences.
I have been doing individual and group therapy with kids and teens for years, dealing with some complex topics. It has been my experience that kids can learn in a variety of ways. If a handful of the kids get it thoroughly through books, another handful might get it through a game, another handful might get it through roleplay practice and drills, another might understand after watching a movie, some might get it after watching a live demonstration, etc. It might take several approaches before a kid goes “Oh, now I get it!” It is not alway linear either- environment and other situations could make a huge difference on their present progress point.
I haven’t finished reading the rest of the thread, but I wanted to comment on this first. I can speak as someone who was bullied constantly from the time I was in elementary school until I graduated high school. Just because your child says the bullying has stopped, does not mean that it has, in fact, stopped. I told my parents about it and they said the same things to me that you said to your child (ignore them, show it doesn’t bother you, be their friend, laugh it off, etc. etc.) and it NEVER went away. However, I still told my parents that it had stopped, even when it had not. I wanted to please them, after all. You are in a constant battle at school when you are the victim of bullies; the last thing you want or need is more stress at home. And having to explain to my parents in detail the situations I was going through on a daily basis at school would have amounted to further stress.
I would not automatically dismiss the bullying as a possible cause. It was the PRIMARY cause of my underachievement in school. I could think of nothing else when I was in school besides the constant stress of being bullied and picked on. I hated school. To this day I do not have any fond memories of school to speak of, and it was more than 20 years ago.
It could certainly be a factor with your child. I would be sure to absolutely, positively rule it out using other sources besides just your child’s word.
Conversations like this one make me feel just like I did the first time one of my kids tried to climb a tree, or first started to walk, or screwed up his courage to tell me he thought I was wrong about something and argue the point. So proud and apprehensive and admiring all at the same time. Good for you for being proactive, but, honey, careful, you need to watch out for that…
The process of becoming a parent to a school aged child is hard for a lot of people. And I think mostly people don’t know what is going on most of the time while it’s happening and only figure it out later (if they are lucky). This is especially true when the child in question is an oldest child it seems to me.
If this is your idea of how to maintain a relationship with your child’s school and work together, I gently suggest you might want to rethink it. Your child’s Kindy teacher would be justified in giving you a failing grade in “plays well with others”.
I would start by volunteering in the school or in the child’s classroom. This gives you a marvelous opportunity to see how the classroom functions and how your child functions within it and will give you volumes of information which will allow you to support your child’s education at home by extending it into the home naturally. It will also make clear to you what problems she is having, if any, in ways that all the parent teacher conferences int he world would not do.
If this is not possible, I would ask the teacher for a meeting – but you must go into the meeting with more questions than answers on your list of things to do. Then just talk about it. You will find that your concerns and her concerns are different, and this is because parenting is different from teaching. You will almost certainly find out that what your child does at school is not the same as what she does at home.
In general, regression appears in a lot of contexts – if a young child is taught to do sums and is then presented with manipulables to do sums or vice versa, or is otherwise asked to apply skills acquired one way in another context. Performing is not the same as mastery. And what is obviously the same thing to an adult is not necessarily the same thing to a child. The things you mention might be worrisome and might not, depending on what else is going on.
You can put me in the “don’t send a letter, request a meeting” camp, too, letting her know briefly what you wish to talk about.
Most importantly, though, approach the meeting with the genuine attitude that you wish to co-operate with the teacher and with the school. As RickJay’s post demonstrates, there’s no way you’re going to settle all of the big questions about teaching methods. What you need to do is to find common ground with the teacher, so that you are able to reinforce what your daughter is doing in school, and so that the teacher has a greater understanding of what is happening within the family.
Also, in the interests of making clear your intentions of co-operation, I’d save any consultation with medical professionals until after the meeting. You can bring up the writing-letters-backwards issue, and ask the teacher whether in her opinion it might be helpful to get a medical opinion. Bear in mind that some (but by no means all!) experienced teachers are as good at diagnosing conditions such as dyslexia as anybody. And that many get weary of the “OMG my child can’t read as well as we think they should, they must be dyslexic!!1!” attitude which some parents have, and therefore the specific albeit tentative use of the term in your letter, or in a conversation, is likely to produce a negative reaction. (And, FWIW, I went through phases of inverting letters, of reversing syllables in a word, and all sorts of things, for several years, and then it all just disappeared without any specific help.)
Personally I would opt for a “could we please meet with you to discuss Sophia’s apparent problems at school. Your advice would be greatly appreciated,” kind of approach. Walk in to the meeting with the assumption that you are all after the same result and ask what could be happening.
Both of my children were placed in special programs for gifted children when they were in primary school and both ended up attending selective high schools. I recall from the parent’s nights run for the parents of the kids one of the speakers explaining how hard it is to find gifted kids once they are in the school system. She said that many children will regress when they realise that their classmates can’t do what they can. She recounted a story about a child she had taught who appeared to read no better than the other kids in the class until she discovered that her 3 year older sister was taking out library books for the younger one.
There are a pile of different possibilities but why bother making enemies. If you sense that something is wrong, enlist all the help you can get and start looking at alternatives but forget trying to sheet home the blame. It saves lots of subsequent apologies.
If you want to write a note to the teacher giving her a heads up about your concerns before the meeting, that’s great. But it should be brief, and it should be considerably less accusatory.
I find that, as a rule, people are disinclined to react positively and constructively to correspondence that can be summed up, from the recipient’s perspective, as a big steaming pile of “What the hell is wrong with you?”
Now granted, I was in kindergarten a looong time ago, but I was thinking this same thing. We didn’t learn to read, or write anything more than our names in kindergarten. Math skills weren’t a part of it either. I thought the main point of kindergarten was socialization for a group setting: to learn to share, take turns, cooperate, sit still, listen and be quiet so that learning could take place. We were, of course, taught some basic stuff like how to recognize numbers, letters, colors and shapes, to write our names, etc. but that was about it. Back then, of course, it was almost unheard of for kids to go to preschool, though.
You don’t say if your daughter went to preschool or not, but I should think that if she’s an only child (as was I), just learning all the basics of how to act appropriately in a group setting should be plenty enough to expect of her. I mean, she’s only 5, right? And if she isn’t used to dealing with larger groups of people, it can be really tiring. And confusing. Not everyone treats you the way you expect to be treated, and it’s hard enough to figure out how to deal with that as an adult, much less a 5-year-old.
I think you might be overworrying, but of course talking to the teacher is essential. Finding out how your daughter acts in class and how others act toward her could be quite revealing.
So the OP’s concerned about his daughter staring at a video screen for an hour every day?
How could a child ever be expected to become an asset to society by staring at a monitor?
Thank Og that us responsible citizen types never spend countless hours doing anything like that.
I heartily agree with those who suggest a face-to-face meeting rather than a letter. Although I’m sure you only have the best of intentions, the letter makes you sound pompous and aggressive.
JohnT, may I ask why it’s so important that your daughter be able to spell cat, mat, bat, etc. right now? My husband learned how to read when he was 3; I learned how when I was 6; and today, we’re both avid readers. His three year jump on me hasn’t given him any long-term advantage.
You mention that your daughter is most comfortable with older children. I would suggest that right now, it’s more important for her to learn how to interact with her peers than to parse out words phonetically. It’s fun to be the pet of the older kids, but she needs to learn how to hold her own with kids her age. If kindergarten winds up being more about learning social skills and less about academic skills, is that so bad?
I’ll second this. My daughter in particular seems to have regressed when she got into school - the teachers still flag her as pretty bright. But I think its a quickly learned survival skill - to appear to be like everyone else.
Your letter sounds accusatory, when I think it should be more “I’m concerned about this.” I’d make an appointment to go talk to the teacher. Go volunteer in the classroom and watch how your daughter interacts with the other kids. Watch how the teacher interacts with the kids. Do kids needing extra help get lots of extra praise and attention while kids who have no problems coming up with the answer are expected to be self sufficient? Has your daughter fallen in with a pack of little girls who value Bratz dolls above books?
When my daughter was in kindergarten there was one girl in particular that she became friends with - and it was not good for my daughter. The little girl was smart - that wasn’t the issue - but she was (and still is) very emotionally immature - and my daughter has her own emotional maturity challenges. Seperating them in first grade pretty much stopped my daughter’s emotional regression. Not a lot the teacher could do except try and keep them apart as much as possible - but she was a very experienced teacher and recognized what was happening.
Just a small comment. My daughter learned to read from “Between the Lions” on PBS. This was unintentional as my husband tended to use PBS as a babysitter when she was 3. We had not worked with her at all up to that point planning to wait until she was in preschool but by that time she was already reading phonetically around the grocery store, signs on trucks, etc.
I am not saying TV is a necessary teaching tool but I disagree that it is useless.
Now that I have finished reading the thread , I will offer my opinion. I agree with those that have said the letter comes across as arrogant and condescending and has the tone that you know far more than your daughter’s qualified educator.
In addition, I think you are putting far too much pressure on such a young child. If the teacher seems to think she is on track, what is the difference if she has a little regression? She’s still young, has much information being thrown at her daily and she is likely to forget some. She will relearn it and recall what she learned when she is ready.
If your concerns are so important to you that they must be addressed , I think you should sit down with the teacher, tell her what you have noticed and ask what she thinks. If you are not happy with their teaching methods, investigate another school that embraces your philosophy.
Sorry to hear that Sophie’s kindergarten experience hasn’t been what you’d hope.
I’m thinking the regression thing might be perfectly normal and expected, but I don’t know. I’ll ask my girlfriends about that.
The reason I suspect it’s normal is that I’ve seen similar traits in my twins – lots of things have been two steps forward and one, or two, or three steps back. In fact, once they reached an age where they had to learn to deal with each other, both of them stopped growing in language skills for a while. And then it picked up with a vengeance.
Also, lots and lots of studies say that most kindergarteners really aren’t ready to read. There are tons of arguments for waiting until children are 7 years old, in terms of brain development and the ability to process symbolic information.
Personally I think early reading is way over-rated; the parochial school I attended at the beginning of first grade didn’t teach us many reading skills. When I switched to public school later in the year, I was substantially behind my peers and had to have tutoring in the principal’s office. But nonetheless, by third grade I was reading at the 6th grade level.
So don’t be surprised if some of her talents stall for a while, and then take off later.
At the same time, I get a kick out of it when my kids watch Super-Why and “read” along. That show is very phonetic, btw. I find their mangling of familiar fairy tales extremely irritating, but that’s another story. It’s very new, I’m surprised that a teacher would use it in a classroom, I wonder what she used in previous years?
In terms of your letter, I think you sound like a typical over-reacting parent. 
I think letters are a good idea in general, though, for clarity and recordkeeping. And maybe getting all that off your chest was cathartic?
And I agree with you about using phonics rather than whole-word recognition. The last recommendation I saw said that there are something like 20-50 whole words that first-graders are supposed to know by sight, but they should also know phonics.
To me, the more important question is is Sophie having fun in school? Does she report headaches or stomach aches? Does she speak enthusiastically about her time there? Is she making friends? Since she’s an only child, I’d imagine it’s quite a shock to be in a classroom all day long. If she’s handling that well, then I’d think you could call her experience a success.
My understanding on the whole word thing.
A lot of kids can’t understand the symbology of phonics until about 2nd grade (lots of kids do and good for them, but you can’t leave the other ones behind). So kindergarten and first grade is about building the skills to get thoughts on paper - damn the spelling - and being able to recognize those 50 or so words. If they have to do this with pictures in kindergarten, that is fine. In first grade they do more phonics work - as that is the point at which they’ll leave far fewer kids behind - but its sly phonics - not the whole out phonics based education I got in the 1970s. But my kids understand long e and short e. Second grade my kids got spelling tests - and spelling becomes important.
And if you don’t like this - wait until you see how they are doing double digit subtraction. Education has changed from when I learned “new math” - and that I learned “new math” sort of implies that there was an “old math” before that. Educators are constantly evaluating different ways to teach concepts - and some of those work there way into the classroom.
My daughter flips numbers (second grade) and we’ve been told it isn’t necessarily a sign of dyslexia - most kids outgrow it and as long as she’s getting the concepts, they don’t worry about it until about third grade. I mentioned this to her dentist and he said “I had the same problem - outgrew it.” I figure he got through dental school.
I think there are fundamentally two extremes to taking care of some of this stuff - one is to sort of accept it until it actually IS a problem - and, IMHO, none of this is in Kindergarten. The other is to advocate strongly starting out for your child. That has the advantage of catching something like dyslexia early - but it can also label both you and your child with labels you may not want to be burdened with. My own take is that I’d rather wait until it is a problem - but bring up the concerns we have every parent teacher conference - than risk having my kid labelled negatively unnecessarily. And I don’t want to get labeled as a “difficult parent” either - since that won’t be good for my kids. The school knows what parents and kids are difficult - and those kids often end up getting the teachers who don’t care next year.
(There is a third option - opt out of the school system and homeschool. That way you can teach you child exactly how you think they should be taught, tailoring a completely individualized educational experience for your kid - schools, even private schools, don’t have that luxury. Homeschoolers don’t after they have more than one kid, either.)