Skip to main content

Respect. It's not what you think...

I'm an occasional participant at the Math Forum at the Fields Institute in Toronto. It's a meeting of folks interested in math education research held monthly; I'd get there more but academic and other responsibilities often overlap. Even today I was supposed to be at school for Homecoming but it's been a year since I made it and the topic, on teacher-coaching, was well worth it.
At lunch, I sat myself amongst some folks I didn't know and the conversations ranged wildly. At one point, the conversation turned to how teachers had lost the respect of the public, that it was different in the past, and so on. Blame was placed on the former provincial government for taken an aggressive and demeaning approach to teachers. And I'm certainly not denying there is some truth in that effect that government had on the perception of our professionalism. But there's more to it than that.
The woman who initiated the conversation gave the example of a parent who had called her with a question. The teacher was quite offended that the parent said that his son "Chris doesn't believe you're helping him enough." Now, she even corrected herself when she changed the word "believe" from "think" and how she then explained what extra help options were available to Chris. I didn't get a chance to add to the conversation because another tablemate (thankfully) quickly changed the topic to the pronunciation of certain Swahili words.
This teacher seems to be mistaking respect with obeisance-- she seemed indignant; the parent had no right to ask her a question about the instruction in or out of her classroom. I even think the parent phrased the question respectfully; the teacher could have quoted the parent with "I don't think you're helping Chris enough" but the teacher was specific in how she remembered the conversation, the parent was already placing the responsibility for the misinformation on the student.
Our classrooms, our instruction, our approach, our philosophy should not only be clear and open with our parents but also open to being questioned -- the wonderful thing about the age of communication is the opening of discussion. And not just discussion -- the simple distribution of information on homework, assignments, testsextra help times. I still remember a time when you would go to the doctors and take their direction without questioning. Not nowadays -- there are other perspectives, updates in the field that an interested participant may bring to the table.
I know some of my parents aren't happy with my approach to mathematics teaching. They want pat formulas & algorithms that will help them help their kids at home; they don't want to see their children struggle with hard problems or not know all the answers when they used to in previous classes. They want to see worksheets and pages of questions like they remember. They want marks to be added up and averaged. And I understand their concerns and I'm always happy to take time out to explain the hows and whys of my choices in our classroom. Their questioning is not dis-respectful; in fact, I think it's part of their parental responsibility to question if they have concerns.
What is disrespectful is not supporting the teacher outside the school. Like a couple with shared custody, we have to work as a team and can't be disparaging of the other, even if we don't necessarily agree with them. It's not always easy to share custody but it is possible.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Desmos, OneNote & Replay

So using Desmos activities are a great way to encourage exploration and discussion in math class -- if you haven't tried them, I encourage it.  They're collected at  https://teacher.desmos.com/  But ... Desmos doesn't give you quite enough.  It doesn't have a way of capturing the work that the student does within their space, and it doesn't allow for annotation of class contributions as we come together to discuss.  Well, not surprisingly, OneNote comes to the rescue.  Using the Windows shortcut Windows-Shift-S it is really quick to snag the Desmos screen and pop it into a waiting OneNote page.  From there, we can grab our pen and (using wireless projection) talk about what all the different responses mean and where to go from there. (An aside : one of the nice features of Desmos activities are the way you can hit PAUSE and it will pause all the screens of the students working.  I always give them a heads up "10 seconds to pause..." and it's refr

So you want to hack your OneNote Class Notebook

Taking a brief break from my "Getting Started with OneNote Class Notebook" series (you can start that one here )... This is a little advanced so if you're not comfortable setting permissions inside of Office365 you may want to avoid this.  Or set up a Class Notebook to play with so that it doesn't affect any existing Class Notebooks.  Yeah, the latter is a good option. One of the great powers of OneNote is that you can do some really neat permissioning of the Section Tabs. When the Notebook is created, of course, it gives you an "open permissions" on the Collaboration Space and student-read-only on the Content Library.  And then each student space is wide open to each individual student. But we've found that occasionally you want to mix up the permissions a little.  For example, you could create a space in a student section for your private notes that the student couldn't see, or maybe you want a tab in the Collaboration Space that students cou

Escape Room / BreakOut in OneNote

[[Part 2 of this article is here: Link] ] So when I was visiting  Anna in Edinburgh  during March Break, she showed me how she used Password-Protected OneNote sections within the OneNote ClassNotebook to help students check their work -- she set the password to the correct answer, so they knew they had it right when the Section opened up. I figured I could use this for Math Review, so I set aside a couple of hours (turned out to be 3 hours but a fair chunk of that was solution-time) the other night to put an Exam Review together for my Grade 10 Mathematics course.  I pulled together as many multiple choice questions and short answer questions on the topics as I could Google and tried to balance each Section with a mix of topics and then threw in a couple of pop-culture questions, too.  The students worked on the problems in each section and used the answers as passwords to unlock the next section until they got to the Prize section. Result?  Near total continual engagement