Saturday, November 06, 2010

Priceless or Pathetic?

120 Students

69 F grades on Friday's Progress Reports.

Number of parent calls, emails, or conferences?

Zero.

Pathetic.

On an aside, we've had the past two Thursday evenings set aside for parent conferences.  My team had quite a few openings in our schedule.  We did get a few walk in's - including a mom who passed the school on the way home from work, saw the marquee, and pulled in, thank goodness, as we were going to call her to set up a meeting anyway.  However, it never was busy.

Pathetic.

Why do I care more about these kids' future than their parents do?

5 comments:

The Vegas Art Guy said...

Because we're teachers. I will say I did get more kids this year for Open House than last year but it was still only about 20% of the parents. I did hand out extra credit to kids who brought their parents so that did help. Maybe next time you should offer EC to any kid whose parent comes to the meeting, you might get a few more.

I had more kids pass this quarter than last year but I still had about 30% of my regular kids fail.
I guess it's too much to ask of them to read a book in 4 weeks...

Sigh

Kristen said...

I'm sorry that there are so many kids whose parents don't care. I'm sure the parents have no idea what's going on. I teach 1st grade and I can't get parents to come in for conferences, call back or even check the homework! Pathetic! But hey, I have parents who can't even do the first grade homework!

Dragonrider said...

Ditto what Teacher Stuff said. Many of our parents have never attended school and can only make an 'X' for their name. They work 16 hours a day to provide for the family and our students are taking care of their siblings from a very early age.
There are also the students who just don't care and refuse to do any work whatsoever. When one parent said they had no idea their child was failing the teacher asked them if they had read the progress reports, letters sent home, or listened to the phone messages.
Yet, in our state, it's always the teacher's fault! Go figure!

http://dkzody.wordpress.com said...

>>Why do I care more about these kids' future than their parents do?<<

Another reason I had to leave.

Dan Edwards said...

Sounds like my school. A number of us are thinking of making homework worth only 10% of the grade or so.....most of the grade based on classwork, participation and tests. IMO, it sucks, but when parents are not doing their part, students not doing school work outside of class, the administration demanding to know what YOU TEACHERS are doing about all your students that YOU are FAILING.......