My son is in high school. He has 7 classes with 4 female and 3 male teachers.
We had open house last night. We went to each classroom and the teacher had 10 minutes to address us parents and tell us such things as what the class is about, the materials used, grading policies, homework, etc…
Now the thing is 2 of the teachers (guess which gender) decided they should share pictures of their kids, family, and even their pets. One (geometry teacher) talked about being a new mother. Another (english teacher) shared how she and her husband were trying to have a second child so her son would have a sibling.
Now I don’t mind a teacher saying things like how many years they have been teaching, their degrees, or where they went to college but this stuff of talking about their kids at home was just a total waste of time for me and frankly shows a lack of professionalism. Talking to my son he says they talk about their kids a lot in class also.
Now it wasn’t all the female teachers. The older two kept the meeting strictly professional and shared nothing personal. It was the youngest 2 that gave the kid reports. Now when I say “young” that is relative because both have been teaching for over 5 years.
So what do you all think? Do you find some teachers talk too much about their personal lives? Why do they do this? Do they want some sort of sympathy or personal connection with parents?
Are you all seeing more of this in your kid’s teachers? What do you think of it?
Thinking back to my own school days, I don’t think my own teachers brought up their personal lives much in class—but I didn’t have very many young teachers.
I’m curious as to whether your hypothesis that it’s mainly younger female teachers who overshare is at all valid. You do, after all, have a very small sample size there.
Teaching (especially at the pre-college level) is sort of innately tied to parenting so I guess it doesn’t seem surprising that they would share with other parents.
As far as sharing with students goes, my guess for younger teachers is that they had a closer or more casually personal relationship with their college level educators and enjoyed it. Then they teach high school students and are trying to be the kind of educator they recently liked. Or are trying to give the high school students the privilege of being more adult-like by having a more college tone. Of course, most high school students couldn’t care less about their American Studies teacher’s toddler daughter but, hey, worse things they could be talking about.
When I was in high school (1991 so not a new thing), in my senior year my Composition instructor was a young woman who had recently graduated. She would talk about her personal life such as discussing having a boyfriend, her siblings, what she did that weekend, etc. It didn’t have any negative impact that I could see; she was a good teacher for the class and was voted Teacher of the Year by the students. I don’t know that a teacher being that open is a good OR a bad thing so much as just… a thing.
If my kid’s teacher started telling stories about their personal life, I’d probably start sneaking glances at my phone, maybe composing a text or two. And I’d probably get caught.
Were the teachers revealing personal information to the kids, or to the parents? Because I don’t see a problem with the latter. Teachers are immensely important figures in our children’s lives - I always like to learn more about them as individuals. The parent-teacher relationship, is, after all, a partnership aimed at benefiting the kids.
Yes, they’re trying to establish a personal connection with you. It’s extremely important to keep the parent/teacher relationship from defaulting into something adversarial.
With students, one of the greatest challenges, probably the greatest challenge, of teaching is classroom management. One big way to establish a rapport with students is to make personal connections with them, and some teachers go further than others. I tend to draw a very broad line between my personal life and my classroom, but other teachers don’t.
It works very, very well. Students love it when they feel like they “know” their teacher. The dark side is that it’s extraordinarily easy to slip over the line and get in big trouble even if you didn’t mean to do anything wrong, or even if you did nothing wrong but still appear to have. Mandatory reporting becomes especially problematic if you have access to a student’s social media.
From my perspective, this is something more common to newer teachers than younger ones (though obviously there’s a great deal of overlap there). Experienced teachers are more likely to be very good at creating structure and connecting with students without doing that sort of thing. As you get better at classroom management, the cost:benefit ratio for getting personal with students shifts until there’s just not much value in it anymore.
I don’t really see the problem here. I presume they were trying to show you that they understand what it’s like to be a parent, they understand kids, they want to build bridges with you etc.
It’s actually pretty standard management technique these days - show a bit of yourself to build a bond with your subject.
There are valid reasons to make yourself seem more “real”. Effective teachers have a persona they use to connect with students, and some of those are very personal: work for me because I’m you’re big sister/mom/grandma/father figure looking out for you. There are also effective personas that involve appearing not to have a life outside school at all.
That said, oversharing can be a problem in two cases:
One, you are too honest and you drag kids into emotional shit about your life. That shouldn’t happen. This is the teacher that complains about her marriage, her problems with her job, her illnesses, whatever. They use their students as emotional support. It’s not healthy and it can go to very bad places.
Two, you are just a narcissist, and you use teaching as a way to have a captive audience so you can talk about yourself all the time. This is obnoxious and obviously not something that leads to effective teaching.
In terms of gender, I think maybe women use sharing as a way to connect with others more than men, so it’s probably more common for women to use sharing as an effective teaching persona. On the other hand, in my experience the narcissist teacher and the using-students-for-emotional validation teacher are pretty evenly divided between men and women.
School culture also varies a great deal on this. Some schools are almost like tutoring centers, with an harsh line down the middle of the desk. Others are much more casual. My current school is small and specialized, so the kids all have the same teachers as their friends and all the teachers teach the same kids, so it makes for a much more small-town feel. Everyone knows everyone, so we tend to know each other’s business. We also all, kids and teachers, work a great deal, so there isn’t so much outside of class anyway. It all blurs together.
ETA: Final thing. It also depends upon what you teach. I do a lot of college access work, which means I end up knowing so much about kids–family dynamics, household income, personal fears. Just tons of stuff. In some ways it means I share LESS, because there needs to be some sort of boundary and once you are swapping deep dark secrets you are in trouble. But on the other hand, it’s hard to reveal all that to a robot. So they need to see I am a person. Also, I’m a white middle class lady talking to poor minority kids. I need to be personal enough that they know I understand where they are coming from and that I’m on their side.
I don’t know if a parent meeting, which I’m guessing this was without the kids present is the place for a teacher to be discussing her personal life. I’m a substitute teacher, so I don’t have to do parent meetings, but I know the kids sometimes enjoy a “personal” connection, so I’ll sometimes mention something about my family. Nothing too personal, but there are times when it can be relevant. I know there is one teacher I have subbed for over the years. I don’t know how much information she shares with her classes about her family, but she has pictures of her kids all over her classroom. It’s not just on her desk, they are all over her whiteboard to the point that there’s limited space to use it, on her bulletin boards, etc. I think that’s over the top, but hey, my philosophy is you do you.
As a student I would enjoy my teacher talking about themselves a bit. I’m not a parent but I know I wouldn’t want to hear about the teachers kids while I’m there for a conference. That seems to be more of a business setting.
I recall back in ye olde days that some teachers talked a lot about their personal lives. It was mostly the women. I think some of the men were being very careful about revealing details of their personal lives. I don’t think it hurts for teachers to talk a little about their lives outside of school but it shouldn’t be a distraction either.
Well that was the thing, the older and yes male teachers, the short meeting with parents was strictly business. Ex. This is world history, I teach this way, I have been teaching for X years, here is how to get in contact with me, …
Frankly to me the time we had was short and this is what I wanted. When the teacher takes the time to show pictures of her new baby, shares details of the kids likes and such, and one talks about why she wants another and why her husband does not, well frankly that’s none of my business.
Talking about fertility struggles sounds out of bounds, but sharing personal info was something my own public school teachers did in the late 80s/90s, and we kids loved it. Looking back, I can name the kids and at least give details about the spouses of most of my elementary and middle-school teachers. And I can tell the story about how my high school chemistry teacher found out he only had one kidney (!)
Now this is what I’m thinking also. Many times in the past my son has had teachers that seemed like they had a sub almost every other week or so because the teacher was always taking days off because of her kids. Ex. Kids sick and had to stay home with them. Need to take kid to dentist. Need to go to something at my kids school. Another took an hour off everyday to go pump.
Now don’t get me wrong I have kids myself and sometimes have to take time off work but does her kid take precedence over the 24 kids she’s paid to take care of? Even with a good sub the kids don’t learn as much.
So might she share personal information so when she takes time off parents will have empathy?
Exactly. we had about 10 minutes for each session and we were here for information about the class and really nothing else.
Yes, I agree its good for teachers to share an occasional personal anecdote (I remember one back in the days who revealed he stayed in college to avoid the draft) but I feel some don’t understand that this was a business meeting with parents. Not a social call.
Teachers are humans. Of course they will share, as will the students. Sharing, relating, empathy, etc. are part of the learning process. I’d rather the teacher be personable than be a robot. If the sole purpose was to convey the rules of the class, etc. then a written syllabus could have been provided and be done with it. The reason you are meeting in person is to get to know the other person.
Back to school night is not a business meeting with parents. You are not their customer, nor are you their employer. Their employer provides them a benefit package which presumably allows them to take personal time off.
It’s also the case that the reaction to sharing differs by gender.
There’s a good bet our OP, a fairly traditionalist male by his own admission, finds this sharing more offputting / inappropriate than did his wife.
Had I been there I’d probably agree with the OP that the amount of sharing was excessive and relatively unprofessional. But I’d also have chalked it up as par for the course for a modern 20-something vs. my own more reserved late-50s sensibilities.
Modern society shares a lot more than we used to. This isn’t, or shouldn’t be, news to anyone in 2017. Not even to geezers or hard-core traditionalists.