Tips for Teachers: Ten Things Parents Really Want To Tell You

As you know, I’m a teacher. But I’m also a parent. As a parent there are some things about my daughter’s teachers that drive me nuts. In addition, I train teachers for a living. And I’ve seen it all—believe me. Having abused parents in one of my prior posts, I’d now like to inform teachers what they could do to smooth the instructional path. What follows is a handy list for teachers to use if they want to keep relations smooth:

1. Use the internet/email—please. Everyone else in the world does, and yet many teachers, certainly not all, but many, don’t think they have to. Email is an easy, unobtrusive way to communicate with parents and it takes much less time than trying to catch someone on the phone. In addition, there is this handy new invention called the world wide web (www, for short). Most schools now have “class pages” where teachers can post assignments, rubrics, class policies, etc. Use it. Please. See #2 below.
2. Provide written instructions for major projects. If you want parent involvement, you have to provide written instructions for complex assignments (and post them on your class page—see above). Often students forget, don’t know, or don’t care about the format or content of assignments (it’s a learned skill, like much else—my daughter still insists that if she can read her own messy handwriting, it’s fine).
3. Don’t EVER say to my child, “I don’t do math” or “I hated science when I was your age.” One of your jobs is to be a roll model. If you can’t say anything nice about a subject, then don’t say anything at all. Because if you help to ruin my child’s attitude towards any subject, I might just have to hunt you down.
4. Rigorous learning really can be fun. All good learning is fun but not all fun is good learning—make sure you know the difference. Do not make my child copy notes from the book. That’s not rigorous learning. Do not fail my child for not putting their page numbers in the right place. Do not, in anything but art class, grade my child on the quality of her rendering. Students know busy work, and parents know busy work. If you could hear what goes on between parents, you would know we have your number. We may choose to not fight the battle, but we know.
5. Please stop trying to tell me that building a model of a boat (or making a collage) will help my child with reading comprehension. That’s just silly. The “creativity’ that needs to be encouraged in school is intellectual creativity, not artistic creativity. Intellectual creativity is not “anything goes” nor is it especially artistic. Albert Einstein had to work within and explain the known rules of the universe before he could convince people of the Theory of Relativity. Truly creative people do not, in fact cannot, ignore the realities in which they find themselves. What they can do, and do do, is interpret and synthesize facts in ways that no one else has thought of. This is a learned skill for most people. Please teach it. If you don’t know how, please learn.Most critically, those who are intellectually creative (or at least those who make their mark on the world) are then able to effectively communicate that interpretation to the world. Because no matter how brilliant a person is, if she cannot communicate her thinking to the wider world, nothing will come of it. Learn your discipline and teach it. Analytical, non-fiction writing is one of the most important things you can teach my child.
6. Please understand multiple intelligences. When Howard Gardner described multiple intelligences he in no way meant that students should only learn to their strengths. What he hoped teachers would understand is that they could use multiple intelligences to help students learn to know and do what they will need to succeed. Namely writing. Analytical writing is thinking. Any writing is thinking. Yes, I may be a kinesthetic learner, but I still need to learn how to communicate effectively. Quit looking for excuses not to teach and focus on instructing those to whom writing/thinking does not come naturally. That is why they are in school. Isn’t it?
7. If you don’t want to work with irresponsible, spacey people with very little impulse control (i.e., children) then don’t be a teacher. As a teacher trainer, I get tired of teachers telling me how bad their students are. Yes, students don’t do their homework, yes they disrupt class, yes they think they are the cat’s pajamas and everyone over the age of 18 is uptight. There never was a time when this wasn’t so, because it’s what children do. If you can’t live with it and find humor in it, then work with grownups (who will act the same way incidentally—even more annoying). Working with children of any age can be terribly frustrating—we’ve all had bad days. But when the bad days outnumber the good days, it’s time to move on.
8. Don’t take out your stress about test results on your students. Standards and testing are not your enemy. The next time I hear a teacher say, “You all better do well on the test, or you’re in trouble,” I’ll scream. Your job is to prepare them to “show what they know.” My daughter’s Kindergarten teacher taught me a valuable lesson that I will pass on to other teachers. One day my daughter came home extremely (happy) excited. When I asked her why, she said, “Tomorrow is our PALS test, we get to show what we know to the whole world.” Well, knock me over! Her teacher, Ms. Knight, had not only taught them what they needed to know to do well on the assessment, she had helped them understand that testing is not to be feared, it’s what helps us know what we have learned and what we still need to learn. My daughter is in 5^th grade this year, and she still is surprisingly mellow about testing.
9. Redefine compassion to include teaching valuable skills. My child will develop self-esteem as she learns to complete complex tasks successfully. If you teach her well, she will develop self-esteem naturally. I’ve never met a student who didn’t know it when she was being lied to about how well she was doing. A deserved bad grade here and there never hurt anyone. A good, large disappointment in life early on is often, when handled correctly, a motivator.
10. Five minutes explaining something to a parent can save you houses of agony. Treat parents as partners, not adversaries. If anything over communicate. Parents talk, so even if one parent continues to be stroppy, if the others feel part of the loop they will help talk the difficult one down. I know this is hard. I am a teacher, as well as being a parent. Sometimes I just want to go home. However, I can tell you that when I give in to that impulse, I always face a pie in the face the next day.

Tips for Parents: What is Academic Writing?

Writing is thinking. If you're not writing clearly, you're not thinking clearly. People cannot think without language, let alone communicate with others. There's no other way to teach "higher order thinking skills" or "critical thinking skills" than to ask students to write analytical responses to rich questions--not narrative or poetry. Like dieters looking for a magic pill, the educational system has tried and will try everything before doing what works.

Most of what is being explicitly taught about writing in schools focuses on the creative aspects of writing fiction or poetry; relatively little focus is put on the types of non-fiction academic writing that students will need to succeed in life and school, like the six non-fiction text structures, sentence (idea) combining, and transition words and phrases. My clients have never asked me to write a story about the results of a workshop. The IRS has consistently rejected my poems about why I need a payment plan.

If this focus on narrative, creative writing sounds illogical, that's because it is. The system focuses on writing as a creative art (as fiction is), rather than a learned, structured skill (as non-fiction is). Elementary school teachers explicitly teach narrative, descriptive writing and then hope that the students intuit how to transfer those skills to write clear, concise analytical responses to complex questions in secondary school. Parents are left to wonder why their children are not able to analyze and synthesize information. Many a parent whose children I work with confide that they are worried because their children write nonsense, that their thinking is superficial and simple. And it is, because they have never been taught any differently.

I can't tell you how many times I've had secondary teachers say to me, "These kids can't write!" Well, that is why they are in school, isn't it? To learn? Or students say to me "I know it, but I just can't explain it." Guess what? There's no such thing as knowing something without being able to explain it. That Emperor is buck naked and it's about time somebody noticed! Clarity of thinking doesn't happen accidentally. We forget that writing is nothing more than thinking made visible. To follow an other's thinking, communication needs to be logically organized and effectively communicated. How to do it needs to be taught, explicitly and systematically in every subject. There is no substitute, no magic pill that will make it happen without actual writing.

Middle and high school teachers often say to me, "I don't teach writing, I teach science (or social studies, or math). However, every teachers teaches thinking--or should do. While non-language arts secondary teachers may not teach grammar, usage, mechanics, and style, they need to teach students how to think and express complex ideas and information in their discipline--using the organizational structures and technical vocabulary most useful to that discipline.

So parents--ask your children's schools and teachers for more non-fiction, analytical writing across all subject areas. Ask when they will do it, why aren't they doing more of it, and what kinds of writing they are doing instead.