Yes, my own shitty grade in gym class was definitely for blatantly refusing to participate. I was willing to take the F for nonparticipation vs. having to humiliate myself by failing yet again to run the mile within Presidential fitness standards or whatever.
The Wikipedia page for PowerPoint suggests he meant Columbia, not Challenger.
That’s the spirit! Every teacher should be constantly subjected to haranguement from every single parent about how to perfectly teach their precious little snowflake.
Honestly, if you care that much about your daughter’s specialized education, send her to an elite small private school. If you can’t afford it, then deal with the limitations of the public school system.
Or home school her himself. I mean, shit, he’s got the time, right?
I wasn’t trying to be critical of teachers, and I’m sure their jobs have their difficulties. My point was that in no other profession do you get to play the, “Hey, my job is hard” card. The internal operation of your organization should be a black box to your customers. If we all had to start making allowances for the relative difficulties of our jobs, nothing would get done right.
I’ve had situations where I’ve had to drop everything I was doing and catch a flight to some customer’s site on an emergency basis. I can show up jet-lagged and exhausted from working the customer’s problem through half the night, but the customer does not care. He expects professional results. Not excuses.
The same should apply to teachers, but for some reason whenever anyone brings up problems with their kid’s educations teachers feel free to start telling everyone how tough their jobs are.
And I love how teachers complain that parents aren’t engaged in their kid’s educations, but when I bring up a problem trying to get information from the school so I can be more engaged, I get accused of being a ‘helicopter parent’ and told that if I don’t like it, I should take my kid to a private school. Nice.
Reading a report card is not “trying to get information from the school.” It is simply receiving information from the school. If you have concerns or questions about what’s on it, you should contact the teacher directly to ask. You’ll get better information that way anyway, even if they did write personalized lengthy comments on the report card.
As far as I am concerned, though, even the best report cards are near to useless if you’re trying to gauge how well or poorly your kid is doing in school. I rely heavily on direct communication with my kids’ teachers, looking at grades that come home on homework and tests, etc. IMO report cards are for parents that are not otherwise engaged with their kids and their classroom performance. (No slight intended, Sam: You strike me as the type of parent that IS engaged with their kid. I just think you’re placing more importance on the report card than it really warrants.)
Nonsense. There are plenty of concerns about other professions: we want to make sure surgeons don’t work overlong hours so they won’t be exhausted when they’re cutting you, and we want to be sure that politicians are keeping themselves free of graft, and we want to make sure that police go out with a partner to lessen the chances of a tragedy, and so on. The difference isn’t that we’re concerned with teachers’ jobs: the difference is that there’s a political movement that shits on those concerns with teachers.
No: what you’re hearing is teachers saying that they don’t have the resources to implement the new initiatives you’re talking about.
I was talking with my local union leader (my state has a useless union, but whatever). He was talking about a local proposal to extend the school day by half an hour, and his opposition to the proposal. “I used to work for KIPP,” he told me. “I have no problem with an extended workday. And when I worked for KIPP, I got a 20% raise over my normal salary.”
If you’re going to implement new initiatives, either pay us for doing more work, or hire more staff to handle the additional work. (And no, before you say something absurd, this isn’t a position I hold for teachers: I’d say the same thing if you’re already having your secretary work 50 hours a week for $30,000 a year, too, and were asking him to take on an additional workload).
Yeah, you don’t come across as a helicopter parent. You come across as someone who’s shitting on teachers without knowing what you’re talking about. Your interest in your daughter’s education is excellent. I applaud that. When a parent yesterday accosted me at the grocery store to talk about the problems her daughter was having, I was more than happy to give her my time (more willing than she was to have it–I eventually walked away when she got in a protracted conversation with someone else). But don’t blame teachers for some software package they’re forced to use, and don’t treat them like the enemy: rather treat them as experts that you can consult for advice. You might find them a lot more forthcoming if you do.
I didn’t blame the teachers - I blamed the software. If the teachers are forced to use it, well that’s too bad, but it’s not the fault of the teacher.
I think you’re being a little overly sensitive here.
Sam Stone. When I was a kid we just got letter grades, but parents were welcome to call, or stop by and ask. But I agree with your point about needing specific information.
However teachers are also in kind of a shitty situation. You say you have to get up in the middle of the night rush off tired and jet lagged sometimes. However I bet you’re also adequately compensated for that, otherwise what would be the point?
Teachers on the other hand aren’t necessarily properly compensated, or properly supported. So your rage is really best directed at the voters for not fixing the system.
You totally blamed the teachers.
That’s putting all the responsibility on the teacher, and inferring a lack of thought on the part of teachers who use it.
That’s not true at all. I’m a software engineer. If my boss assigns too much work to me, such that I can’t complete it all within the time alloted, it is my duty to tell her so that she can rearrange priorities. She trusts that I will work diligently and competently, but she knows I’m only human.
Of course - that’s a problem between you and your boss - not between you and your customer. I’m not saying that people in hard jobs should just suck it up - I’m saying that at the end of the day, all the customer cares about is whether he or she got what was promised.
Left Hand of Dorkness: You’re right - I did blame teachers - at first. I never realized that the use of this software might be mandated. But since people have popped up and said that the use of this software is determined at the board level or somewhere other than with individual teachers, then they clearly aren’t to blame.
Also, I wouldn’t even want to use the word ‘blame’. It’s more like, “consider the ramifications of using software like this.”
However, I also think Manwich had a good point - As a parent, I may be assigning more importance to the preparation of the report card, because it’s a major touch point between me and the teacher. But from the teacher’s perspective, this may be a trivial part of the overall effort put in teaching the child, and therefore taking shortcuts with it isn’t going to have the kind of effects I mentioned in terms of changing the way the teacher sees the child.
RickJay: Yeah, I meant Columbia, not Challenger.
Who is the customer for the teacher? Is it the society at large, which pays the teacher’s salary? Is it the student, who most directly benefits from instruction? Is it the parent, who is the single adult closest to that direct benefit? Or is the customer model inapt when dealing with the education of children?
Part of the effort to create consistency across classrooms has been a staggering number of initiatives. A couple of years ago, we got a weekly schedule showing how much time we should spend enacting each initiative in our classroom. The problem was, once you accounted for bathroom breaks, 30 minutes of mandated recess, walking to and from the cafeteria, etc., there were 5 hours a week more of mandated initiatives than there were hours of instructional time.
When something weird is happening across classrooms, administration is the first place to look, in my experience.
One of the big challenges of teaching, something I’m grappling with in a lot of detail right now, is how to use assessment. It has two major uses–formative and summative (that is, used to guide future instruction, and used to provide feedback on learning), and then the summative instruction provides feedback to central office, parents, and children. Figuring out how to balance these various uses of assessment is fairly complex.
I think there are many fields where people get to use the, “my job is hard/I don’t have enough time” excuse to customers/clients: law enforcement, DMV workers, etc. The jobs are in the public sector and the client is the general public, and no single individual can really get any policy change they want. Since you’re someone who enthusiastically embraces an individual’s opportunity to exercise choice in the private sector, frankly, I think my suggestion of private school was apt.
If you really care about getting better comments on you daughter’s report card, now, if she was in a school where the student-teacher ratio was 15:1 and where they consider you a paying customer, you could call her teacher today and you would see a list of comments by the end of the week. You could complain to the administration at your daughter’s school, but I seriously doubt you will see immediate, if any, change.
One major difference between teaching and most other jobs is that the results are dependent upon cooperation from the “customer.”
A mechanic is solely responsible for the job he does on your car. If part of the repair or maintenance on your car depended upon you—the customer—doing part of the work, how often do you think your car would break down? A shitload more than it does now, I guarantee you. People who do their own car maintenance religiously are analogous to people who would get straight As in school, and in this case I’m talking about pushing it one step further to make the analogy closer to the task facing a teacher. What if the mechanic gave you specs for the starter, all the parts, and asked you to put it together before he installed it in your car. Didn’t do your homework? Whoops! How are you going to get your car started in time for your test?
In your job, you probably depend on information from the client to get things done, but the difference there is that the client WANTS the job to be done. Do students honestly have a great desire to learn what’s in all their school lessons? I really, really doubt it. Imagine how hard your job would be if the client didn’t really give a shit whether a task got done or not, ignored you, or in some cases actively tried to sabotage your efforts, and virtually never actually gave you most of the information you requested they provide.
Teaching depends on cooperation from the students. The results depend not just on the quality of the teacher, the intelligence and motivation of the students, but a whole host of other factors that neither the teacher nor the student have control over. Teachers get shit from the students, shit from their parents, and shit from the administration. In other jobs, you’re usually only facing two fire-hoses of excrement.
So it’s not that their jobs are “too hard” it’s that their jobs are fundamentally different from other jobs.
One last “imagine” scenario: Imagine that your job performance was evaluated not by the job you personally did, but by the results of your clients actions in using your product. How frustrated would you be if the client was pain in the ass who never used your product properly, argued with you about how to use it, and people judged you by his results?
Even from my experience in college prep and honors courses as a kid, that would describe at least a couple of kids in just about every class. Doesn’t matter how hard you try, how interesting you make the material, how much effort you put into it, if they aren’t intrinsically motivated to do the work, nothing in the world is going to produce learning.
In my children’s school the report cards only indicate a number grade (as they did when I was in high school 25+ years ago), but the school has an interim grade report about halfway through each quarter. That is essentially useless.
The purpose is an early warning so if there’s a problem you can work on it with Junior before it’s too late to rescue the quarter. Each teacher can choose from pre-loaded comments and fill in a current grade. In roughly half the classes each quarter the teachers choose “Student is currently passing.”
Which makes that interim report useless for those who have higher goals in mind for their children than passing.
Or is it the principal, who has the most direct hiring/firing/supervisory role over the teacher?
The teacher works for many people, but most would say the LEAST important is the parent.
Whatever, dude, the teachers have done their job. They have taught and evaluated their students, including your kid. Every parent-teacher night, they are there. If you wan to set up a conference to speak more specifically, they will. What part of their job have they not done? Write a personalized essay about your Snowflake’s accomplishments? Get over yourself. Do you believe for one second that the teacher’s assessments were not accurate? Or do you really think Snowflake Daughter needs specialized commentary?
I would rely more on the parent-teacher conferences to determine if the teacher really knows your kid. You can tell a lot more talking to someone face to face than you can on a report card.
I still remember that all my B’s and C’s in high school used to have, “Not working to her fullest potential” next to them. It was really irritating because I never knew what the hell that meant.