Thursday, July 3, 2014

Tips to Parents from a Teacher


Recently I finished Think Like a Freak which tries to get people to think differently.  It briefly discusses education and says that if we are ever going to narrow the achievement gap and/or improve individual student performance we cannot do it all in school.  So one think I do a lot of is schedule individual parent-student-teacher conferences (15 out of 60 standard kids had one last year) where, in part, I go over the tips in this video.  Usually kids who are not achieving their realistic success level are ones not following the guidelines in the video.

What I have above is nothing earth shattering, but I think it helps to remind parents, nicely, that even if they are tired in the evening, so are there kids and the parents' job (yes I am bolder as I get older) is to keep their kids on their homework.  So this year I will be sending this video out early and then again to the students whom (no matter the grade) I believe are not up to their ability level.  I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

3 comments:

A.P. said...

Great idea. I will probably do the same and send it out to parents. Cant fix a problem if you cant address it at the roots. I have come to the conclusion that most parents need to be informed. No different than a doctor telling a patient how to improve their health.

eLearning Blog said...

Agreed.

Christina M. Sesok said...

I love it! I've had parents say straight to my face in conferences, "I'd like to help my child, but I have no idea what I'm doing and I'm too busy." It makes me so upset, because I see so many good, smart students slipping through the cracks of the education system.