soapbox

i am a teacher.  and i love to teach. but what i am not, is a parent.  and i mean, a parent to the children that i teach.  someone else gave birth to them and raised them before they entered my classroom.  so i am not sure why my role as a teacher is expanding into being a parent, too.  why am i talking to a child about how he/she should be behaving at home?  do i go home with the children to see how they are behaving, to talk to them about how they should be acting if they start to act out or sass their parent(s)?  no.  because that is not my job.  it is the parents job, is it not? 


and why, why, why, why do parents believe their child over the teacher?  i have been hearing more and more in my classroom and from other teachers, how the parent is believing what the child is coming home and telling them.  and i don't mean your every day response to "how was school?" but the stories that they go home and tell their parent(s) and then we get a phone call the next day questioning US.  parents really think THAT badly of me or the other teachers in the classroom (or any other teacher for that matter) that we are not providing for their children appropriately; that they cannot TRUST us to do our job?  where did the TRUST go?  it really grinds my gears that the level of respect for teachers has declined--maybe it's the area i teach in, and i'm not saying ALL parents are this way because it is definitely not the case, but when i look back on my days in school, things were MUCH different. 

and i think that is part of my gripe...the view on education has dramatically changed as well as the view on teachers.  i really have no idea when people started to lose their focus on how important education is, but it is heartbreaking.  our education system is constantly being tweaked and standards are being forced more and more and kindergartens no longer have blocks and play kitchens; they are expected to do so much more at the age of five.  five years old, people...five!  and it seems as though no one is paying attention to how our economy, how people live, split families, extended families, are affecting children.  no one is paying attention to what children know before they walk through the doors of a school, but they are expected to do so much  and teachers are expected to work miracles, otherwise their jobs will be in jeopardy.  but why aren't we looking at how many more children are going through evaluations each year, how many more children are being diagnosed with one or more learning disabilities?  why are we not taking this into account?


some thing needs to change, and it is not standards.  we need to figure out how to make people realize the importance of education, first. 


...i will step off of my soapbox, for now.