Nancyg56
DIS Legend
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2005
- Messages
- 29,489
I would never send my child to a school where parents can just come in and disrupt the classroom whenever they felt the need to see little sally snowflake. This is a school- this is my childs place away from me, their place of learning not some place for some bored mommy to sit and watch her kids at all day.
When my children were in school parents were able to sit in the classroom for any reason. I doubt that many parents ever did but it was acceptable. Now my children are all adults and clearly, times have changed. I must say that there was one time when my DD was in middle school that I would have moved into the classroom and it was not to observe the teacher. I certainly was not a bored Mommy, far from that. It was because after a very difficult conference with her teacher, the one that he hauled my DD out of her class in order to challenge her claim that she was called stupid in front of the class, the one that he called her a liar when she said he threw things, slammed desks into students desks, screamed names and accused students of destroying his car.............and then admit to all of those accusations.................. I did explain to him that he may intimidate the 14 YO kids but that he was not going to be able to intimidate me.......so if I heard that these things continued to occur he would have another student in his classroom. He had tenure and no one in the administration would address his temper until he tossed a child into the lockers and the boy was taken to the hospital. I was nto willing to have that happen to my DD.
I see more value in meeting with the teacher who sees the child on a daily basis and could maybe pinpoint what might be causing the problems.
This is how my DD deals with any issues Kady had in the classroom.
I think that parent observation can be a tool that benefits some kids in school but I also believe that unless that parent is a fixture in the classroom it is seldom going to show the true dynamics of that classroom. For me, it would be a last resort, after all other avenues of communication had failed. I raised three with a total of 39 years of education and the time I mentioned above is the only time I would have felt the need to intrude on the class in order to discern how my child was doing.
