Student playing a board game at lunchtime.
Every year, there seems to be a class that gets a bad rap-“that class,” which teachers say is tough to teach. Recently a few teachers met with me about this year’s “tough class.”
The teacher’s solution: they wanted to invite the students’ parents into the classrooms to witness how the students were behaving.
I was surprised: why would the teachers want the parents to see the kids behaving badly? In fact, wouldn’t the kids just be good on that day? “Well,” said one teacher, “if the kids are good, then we can say, ‘See, you were good when your parents came in so why can’t you be this good everyday?’”
I remembered my first years of teaching middle school. When I struggled with a student, I would call parents about the problem. In hindsight, I see that I was asking—and actually wishing for– the parents to solve the problem. But in fact, the problem was mine.
My answer to the teachers’ request was no.
This past August, we celebrated our school’s highest graduation rate ever: 83%. For us, this was a triumph; the highest percentage before this point had been 74%. Other things looked good at the end of the year, too: our 9th graders had done well on their exams, attendance increased, and suspensions went down.
I was sure Sophia* was going to become a teacher.
