Questions for my daughter's teacher

In preparation for our first (of what I assume will be many) conferences this year, I wanted to put on paper the questions I’ve wrestled with over the first two weeks of school.

1. Why do so many papers come home each week with percentages marked on them? We have just completed the second week of school. I was always under the impression that grades were assigned only after things have been taught and practiced to determine the degree to which the students had mastered the objectives covered. If that’s the case, then I would imagine, at a minimum, twenty minutes of instruction (and I am being generous here) have been provided per actual grade received. With that in mind, my child would have been in school at least 8.5 hours a day doing nothing but direct instruction – not including the time it has taken her to complete the pile of papers she has returned home. When those are factored in (as well as lunch, playtime and specials), I’d say she would need to be in class a minimum of 10 hours a day. Since that’s not the case, something isn’t measuring up with so much measuring.

2. Why is everything – and I do mean EVERYTHING – a competition? My child knows who is “ahead” of her in math. She also knows boys typically beat girls in math and that one student on her “team” can prevent her from earning smiley faces because he doesn’t put his things away quickly enough. She knows that the behavior of that one person then denies her the spoils of winning (e.g. a snack that the winners get to eat in front of the losers). In two weeks she has “learned” that learning isn’t important for its own sake – it’s important to beat others so that she can go to the prize box and get some old McDonald’s kid’s meal prize as a reward.

3. Why does so much measurement seem to have no relationship to instruction (if said instruction exists in the first place)? When my child misses the same problem on multiple worksheets and we ask her if you reviewed them, she says no. When I go in and record the performances of kids on their timed math (which, by the way is a FERPA violation, but that is for yet another blog post) and one child is still working on the same worksheet day after day, it would seem to me that the poor child needs instruction – not more of the same worksheet.

4. Do you honestly think that loving the kids is enough? I’ve come across a large number of ineffective teachers who, while they loved kids, had no idea how much damage they were causing by virtue of the way they were “teaching” those kids. At this point the only things I can be pretty sure about this year are that my daughter will learn very little. She will probably hate math by the end of the year, and she will expect to be rewarded for everything she does. Frankly, I’d prefer a teacher who merely tolerated kids but who knew how to teach.

5. Do you think doing something for 37 years automatically makes you an expert? Doing something year after year does not necessarily make it effective. There are lots of traditions in the world that have lasted longer than that but that have had devastating effects on communities. For example, child labor, lynching, and slavery all have a long history in this country. That doesn’t make them good practices. Longevity does not make something good – it just makes the number of people affected by it far too large. There are now probably generations of people in this community who hate math and who lost some if not all their love of learning while under your supervision.

Perhaps these questions seem harsh and unfair. The thing is that we’ve entrusted our child to you. She must be with you for seven hours each day. Rick and I are prepared to re-teach lessons that do not go well. If it were merely a matter of ineffective teaching, then we could compensate. But how do we compensate for the lessons you are teaching: you are defined by a series of numbers known as percentages; you are better than some and worse than others and the object of the game is to make sure the “worse than” number is greater than the “better than” number; the quality of life and the rewards you will receive will be based upon the choices of others – good or bad; because you are a girl you will not answer math questions fast enough, therefore you should always remember that boys are better at math than girls. . . . . ?

With six degrees in education and more than 55 years of teaching experience between us, Rick and I cannot correct the potential damage you could create with these lessons. So, with these concerns in mind, what do we do next????????????