Parents...

There's a lot to be said about how parents participate in their child's education.

I have a student who is a 9th grader who missed 18 days of my class since she has a 1 year old baby of her own to take care of. She's only 15. I didn't have the heart to fail her so I based her grade on work that I had from her and so she earned a C+ this marking period. It's not hard to pass my class, you actually have to try really hard to fail since it requires nothing but thickheadedness or massive absences. It seemed like her mother was very supportive of her progress in my class so it's nice to see a struggling young woman get the help she needs at home.

It's students like these that worry me in terms of consistency in the classroom. Based on what's going on in their own lives, it could determine the success of failure of her entire academic year. The rest of her report card contained NC's, F's, and one D aside from my C+. She's the quiet type who does her work and sits up front and makes faces. At least she seems to be enjoying the class.

I've learned that as a science teacher it's not necessarily my job to put people down because they can't do the science, it's to give them some idea of where they are as a student of very basic concepts. If you've mastered the basics, you cannot fail. All these kids are like dull knives, we just have to work on sharpening them from marking period to marking period.

I've got a lot of good feedback about maintaining the class website so it'll be interesting to see how parents use that to keep track of their student's progress in my class. I was getting comments like, "Why don't other teachers do this too?"

I could only offer that the school's working on using more websites for future students.

Anyway, I have to get ready to teach Saturday school... These aren't students, these are parents who are in need to computer instruction on how to make flyers and how to use programs in Microsoft word. I may encourage parents who don't want to pay for office to consider downloading open office since some parents are legitimately strapped for cash and software like this isn't cheap.

Until next time...