August 22, 2016
Dear fellow parents,
Today may be your child’s first day of a new school year. I
totally share your excitement and anxieties – letting go of that little hand
and trusting that the world will be kind. It is my child’s first day, too – as a
teacher. I’m writing to you to plead for your support of new teachers.
Here’s the situation – I was a teacher for twelve years. I
loved teaching, because I loved your kids. I left for one simple reason: I
could not take the system. And please understand, I had a cushy teaching job in
a private school where I was very well respected by my students and parents,
but over the years I saw parent-teacher relationships spiral out of control. I
was not strong enough to exist within a space where my teaching peers were
forced to live in fear of a parent phone call to the office. Back when we were
students in these schools, our parents let teachers do their jobs. The most
effective classroom management strategy for a teacher was simply to suggest
your actions might warrant a call home – now, students have learned to turn the
tables on teachers and declare that their parent is going to call the school. Somewhere
along the way, teachers became your enemies – villains who simply don’t
understand the special needs of your child. It’s never your child’s problem in
the classroom, it’s the inability of the teacher to reach him. While the
teacher is home at night researching new methods to try, you are drafting a
strong letter of complaint to the principal, and if she doesn’t respond
immediately, that letter makes it to the superintendent, then the school board.
Suddenly, the teacher who chose this profession to help your child is being vilified.
What have you gained? You’ve taught your child that rather than take any
responsibility for his own education, he should blame the system for failing
him. And that new teacher? She will retreat to her classroom and stop trying so
hard, learn by default to just follow the mandates, try to get through the year
without doing anything that might be construed as beyond the norm. At first, she
will worry more about losing your kids than losing her job, but eventually she
will become tainted by the reality. You will volunteer at your PTA and be
dismayed to learn the teachers in your school are unhappy, bordering on bitter,
and you will wonder why they became teachers in the first place.
Today, as my darling girl begins her vocation as a teacher,
I am nervous to let go of her hand for fear that the world will not be kind. Every
bit of logic tells me that I should have tried harder to get her more
interested in another field – she is extremely intelligent and would be
successful at anything she pursued. Teaching means she will always be
underpaid, and now worse, undervalued. She chose to get her degree in a program
with some of the most rigorous requirements for licensure because she wants to
be prepared for the challenges that she knows lie ahead. She is going in eyes
wide open, choosing to work in urban high-needs education because she is
passionate about making society better by working with families below the
poverty line. She is trained in all the theories, practiced in all the methods,
volunteered in the kinds of systems she wants to work in. She gets it. She is
ready.
Most people are shocked when they hear my daughter, a child
of middle-class privilege, is working in Lawrence, Massachusetts, one of the
most challenging high-needs systems in the country. True confessions: I hoped
she would get a job in a nice, “normal” suburban school, a place I would
recognize. But you know what? She absolutely made the right choice. In
Lawrence, the teachers make home visits the week before school starts, and
Ashley was welcomed in to their homes and showered with gratitude. She had one
parent who demanded Ashley make accommodations for her son, and the
administrative team immediately put together a plan to support Ashley’s
interactions with that child. Today, her students will arrive and be greeted at
the building door by the principal, at the hallway by the second grade dean,
and at the classroom door by Ashley – not because the first day is special, but
because this school does this simple routine every day. They engage with the
parents, empower them to be part of the community, ensure them that the
children are safe in their care. This school and the community have learned to
work together, to trust the professionals, to respect the families, ultimately,
to love the children.
From our privileged vantage point, we see this school as a
failed institution in a dangerous neighborhood. From my daughter’s standpoint,
she sees a new approach where she can make a difference. Take another look: the
school in your own middle class neighborhood is struggling, too. The new
teacher there is excited to meet your kids, but that joy is overshadowed by the
pressure to meet tough testing standards, or worse, the constant threat of your
demands. The socio-economic status of the school doesn’t matter – we need a
mind shift to trust each other, to allow our children the freedom to be
nurtured by someone other. To be hurt on the schoolyard without making an
accusation of negligence. To fail a test without saying the teacher never
covered the material. To cry over homework without telling them they don’t need
to do it. You will make mistakes with your child, as will the teacher. See each
other face to face and recognize that you are both working toward the same goal
of your child’s success.
So please, on this first day of school for your child, think
about my child, too – the new teacher. She sees your child every day, probably
for more waking hours than you do. She will be influential in your child’s
life, and maybe that’s the real threat. We all want so much for our children,
and life is so busy and demanding that we feel we are never doing enough for
them. And then this smiling young woman enters your child’s life as his new
teacher, and you can’t let go of your child’s hand and put him in her care. You
are incapable of this level of trust with your most precious cargo. Please
understand, she loves your child – even though she’s not required to, she does.
Even if your child is a challenge, she does. She wouldn’t have chosen to teach
otherwise. And, most importantly, she’s not judging you. She knows you are
doing the best you can, understands you have challenges as a parent that she
cannot begin to grasp. You love your child. It is the universal in our world,
no matter how bitterly divided we become. Now it is her turn to help your child
move forward, even tiny steps, because she can. She is uniquely skilled at
connecting with children, looking into their eyes and seeing their
insecurities, listening to their voices and sensing their hopes – and finding
the sweet spot between that insecurity and hope and helping them get there. Teachers
strive to enable – not to assess, analyze, and record – that belongs to the
system. Teachers belong to you, to students and their families. My girl belongs
to you now. Please cherish her as I have. She is worthy of your child. Your
child may love her, or not, but she will cherish each of her students
regardless of his actions, or yours. She is blessed with that ability, her gift
from God, and lucky for all of us, she has chosen to be a teacher. It is her
vocation. Please support her.
Sincerely,
A Teacher’s Mom
