Coddling and hobbling
What can teachers do when they find themselves pitted
against parents? How much should
parents do to protect their children from overly stressful school demands? In today’s competitive world, don’t children
need extra help from their parents in order to succeed? This is an American article. Do Slovak parents tend to be similarly
overprotective?
This is one of those things that simply happen and I do not believe there is anything that can be done against it. I have a family member that taught mathematics at a school that shall remain unnamed and she found herself faced with similar situations all the time. One time (after handing out graded tests) one of the weaker students of the mathematics class told her that he does not care about the bad grades because his parents will “pay the principal to fix them”. I have no words that can describe how I feel about this, especially when I know that there really is nothing the teachers can do against it. The principal accepts it and if the teacher tries anything, the teacher would be going against the student, parents and the school principal all together.
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing wrong about parents helping their children, but there is a limit to how much is acceptable. In this situation, the weaker student will come of better at the end of the year just because his parents were able to buy his way through and a student that was genuinely better comes of worse. The whole point of any grading hence becomes useless. It no longer reflects the student’s abilities in mathematics, but the wealth of the parents. In such case there is no point in having children go to schools at all and we can simply calculate their grades according to the balance on the parents’ bank accounts.
Today’s world might have greater expectations when it comes to the students, but we have to understand that the technological advancements balance it out. Students have the internet as a fast source of information and computational technology for writing documents or printing. Yes, the workload on every student is greater today than it was several years or decades ago, but the work is also significantly simplified and there is definitely no need for parents doing complete assignments for their children because the “workload is too great”.