The start of the school year brings several thousand children back onto our Campuses over an exciting few days, with many hundreds of them arriving for the first time. It’s hard not to feel the energy – new students and their families meeting teachers, everyone seeking out friends, all of them exploring what’s ahead. Mostly it is smiles and laughter, but there is also a very understandable nervousness: for some, a first day in an unfamiliar place; for others, a new year group and a teacher they have heard about but not yet met. All of them wonder whether this year will go as well as the last. And I don’t mean just on the part of the children. For parents and teachers too, there is a tension that comes from caring deeply about what’s coming.
The tension is, I would suggest, quite different to other situations. When my own children were at school, meeting their teachers wasn’t like meeting lawyers, accountants or other professionals – my kids were spending so much time with their teachers, away from me, that it made me feel vulnerable as a parent in ways that were not immediately obvious. Similarly, teachers can be anxious. They are meeting children they do not yet know and have very little time to get it right; and they know that those children will go home and talk about them.
The similarities may not always be clear to teachers with no children or to parents who aren’t teachers. And even as a teacher and parent for over three decades, I realised I had only been dimly aware of this when I read this fascinating comparison by Thompson and Fox Mazzola, on the symmetries of the anxieties here:
| Parents | Teachers |
| Parenting is inherently difficult and intensely personal. Parents find it hard to know if they are doing a good job. The first child in a family makes competent adults feel helpless, and every subsequent child challenges us in new and unexpected ways. All parents are amateurs and we know it. | Teaching is an inherently difficult job that is hard to measure and intensely personal. No teacher can connect with all children or guarantee great outcomes for everyone. When things do not go right in class, we cannot say to an unhappy parent, “You should have seen my class last year. It was amazing.” This leaves teachers feeling vulnerable in front of parents. |
| Parents and parenting are on display through their children. As parents, we know that our children will reflect on the way we bring them up – our parenting, our values and our characters. This can sometimes make us feel vulnerable and exposed. | Teachers’ faults are on display in front of the distorting eyes of children. Teaching is a public, exposing job and the child audience is not always appreciative or kind. Teachers are discussed in many homes many evenings, and the discussions are based on the sometimes distorted impressions of children. This can sometimes make us feel vulnerable and exposed. |
| Parents know that teachers have immense power over children’s lives. Teachers have the power and opportunity to support or to criticise, to nurture or to crush. Parents are keenly aware of teacher power, because as children they too had teachers who made them feel wonderful or terrible. | Teachers are not accorded enough respect in some societies This manifests in different ways; from the way teachers can be spoken to by students and parents; to the profession as a whole relative to other professions. It can be difficult not to feel that in a personal way. |
| Parents may feel trapped by and with their child’s school. Schools are not commodities and are not easily changed, even when things are going badly for a child. For various reasons of geography, friendships, affordability there may be no other options. This can make for anxiety. | Teachers cannot always offer exactly what parents want Over recent decades schools have taken on more and more responsibility for what used to be done at home; but large institutions are not and cannot be families, and so cannot be as responsive to individual needs. This can cause tensions between school and home. |
| In important ways, parents and teachers may know children differently. As children grow up they do not reveal all facets of their personality to their parents. Adolescents, especially, show their teachers sides of themselves that they deliberately hide from their parents. When teachers and parents meet, this is uncomfortable on both sides. | |
The table looks symmetrical, and mostly it is. But there is one central difference. Whether they have one child with us or four, parents’ attention is appropriately singular — this child, in this moment. We care about each child in each moment too, but our attention has to be broader, because we also have to care about several thousand others, this year and in following years. That means what we decide has to work across thousands of different children, now and in the future, and so our decisions can never be shaped around any one of them. Schools need to be honest about this. And that only amplifies the need for us to decide carefully, explain why, and listen when parents tell us we have got it wrong — knowing that sometimes, having listened, we will still reach a conclusion they would not have chosen. All of which is easy to accept in the abstract, and much harder when the child in question is our own (I have been there). But it is still the right way to decide, because a school that bent to whoever asked most persistently would be a worse one, and unfair besides.
Given how much we all care about our kids and our students, and the intensely personal nature of parenting and teaching, it’s not surprising that these tensions can exist. In fact, it’s far better than indifference. We should acknowledge that despite differing perspectives we have a common root of shared hopes for the children in our care. Perhaps the way to deal with anxieties such as those I have mentioned here is to embrace them as natural parts of a home-school partnership and respond to each other in line with our values.
Taking the biggest picture, this is another step along the path toward our aim of fostering a sense of Belonging for everyone in our community. We can never take it for granted – because there is always more to do, and with families and staff moving each year, it is always a work of renewal. Seeing that we all share the same hopes and fears will help.
References
- Thompson, M. and Fox Mazzola, A. (2011) Understanding Independent School parents. Create Space Publishing
3 Responses
With the rising costs of housing in Singapore, I wonder how schools could still recruit the best talent and provide a consistently high quality education. Teachers do feel anxious about these extraneous factors that are beyond their control and it might affect their classroom performance, especially if they have to wake up early and commute long distances and also are worried about their finances. What is UWCSEA doing to support teachers in this regard?
You might add another anxiety, the anxiety that your student or child might never forget the impact you have had on their education experience. That is certainly the case for me, having been a student of yours back when you started teaching! Last year I was diagnosed as a 41 year old adult with ADHD and ASD. Part of this diagnosis was based on a report you wrote for me back in 1995. It is incredibly liberating for me to now know that was the reason school was such a struggle for me. Despite this I now have a medical degree and am a consultant geriatrician, a culmination of 15 years of post graduate training in internal medicine. I am now on my second post graduate fellowship. There is a lot of store put on what happens in high school by both parents and teachers. At the end of the day, what really matters is your belief in yourself as well as the ability to show up, day after day, for your dreams.
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