“If you have lettuce and greenhouse-grown lettuce, what is the difference? Nothing! So why is it different with diamonds?”
Thanks for Bayla Geberer’s article, “Hi, It’s the School Calling… Again,” about how parents and schools can work together when a child isn’t succeeding in the school’s framework. I really appreciated how the article shared perspectives from all sides — the parents and teachers, successful interventions versus failed ones.
At the same time, though, I was dismayed by the wide range of children who needed extra help. Rivky’s case was a classic example: She’d been getting tutored for four years, with nothing to show for it but a loss of self-esteem. As Rivky’s mother noted, there’s always going to be one student who’s lagging toward the back of the class — but Rivky had been maintaining her own, making steady progress, and succeeding socially. Then Rivky’s mother learned how many of her daughter’s friends were being tutored. “The school was pressuring half the class to become honors-level students!” she said. “This wasn’t about my daughter being at the bottom of the class. This was about the school not being okay with anyone at the bottom.”
Today, we have so much more knowledge about how to help struggling learners; we have evaluations and IEPs and interventions, SEITs and medications. But with a wealth of tools at our fingertips, I worry that we’ve completely forgotten that it’s not that some children don’t fit into the mold — it’s that we were never supposed to be turning out cookie-cutter children in the first place. If so many of the kids in our system can’t manage within it, then maybe we need to take a step back and figure out how we can make a more inclusive system.
Name Withheld
I read your article about schools calling parents when issues arise, and it made me feel nostalgic. Growing up, my own parents were loving, but not especially involved with the little details in my life. When I became a mother, I made a conscious effort to be more involved, especially when it came to their schooling. When my kids were young, I welcomed every phone call. I saw it as a sign of partnership between me and the school.
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