I guess I can laugh while reading the post at Tall, Dark, and Mysterious, linked from the title above, because my wife and I plan to live in our daughters' high school classrooms. Seriously. Right now, our younger daughter is in a K-6 program that requires at least 80 hours of parent participation each year. We expect to continue this, resorting to bribery if necessary. And can anyone explain the appeal of a graphing calculator, anyway? If you really have a problem that requires an electronic aid to make graphs, it seems to me the a calculator will not be much help; you'll need something more like MATLAB.
I also plan to subject any boy who comes within 10 feet of either of my daughters to a polygraph and urinalysis. There will be time enough for dating in their 30's...
It's even worse when you're paying a private school to teach your child and they "require" you to participate, still! Wow. I pay taxes to help fund the public school system, pay for a private schoool education, _and_ I have to "volunteer" in the private school??
ReplyDeleteI don't have a teaching degree... how on earth do they know I'm qualified to be working in a classroom??
I think you should want to participate in your child's education. In my mind, the worst thing would be to be shut out. It's not a matter of qualifications; it's a matter of one-on-one attention: you need to know what's going on in school. In our case, the program (called PACE) is voluntary; if you want to participate, you must commit to a certain amount of volunteer work. The PACE program also has a parent "government" that coordinates extra fund raising, enrichment activities, purchases of additional materials for classrooms, and generally working with the PACE teachers as partners. Note that the great majority of students in the district are not in PACE.
ReplyDeleteAs far as helping in a classroom is concerned, the teacher should be able to talk to you and determine how you can best help. It might be grading assignments. It might be helping with reading groups. Anything that frees up the teacher to spend more time with smaller groups of children helps your child.