"RJ" wrote in message
...

On Sun, 06 Jan 2008 03:36:17 GMT, "JoeSpareBedroom"
wrote:

I'll bet you've never walked into school without an appointment and
***TOLD*** the principal you intend to sit in a few classes. Remember
that
you are THE CUSTOMER, and the school personnel are YOUR EMPLOYEES. Don't
ever forget that.


School Admin. usually sings two songs;

The first is;
"You ( parents ) need to get involved in school functions"

BUT

If you do start to get involved, the song becomes;
"Leave school functions to us... we are the professionals"

( been there....done that...gave up )
rj


Bull****. School functions? To me, that means "things that go on at school",
like sports & musical events. Except at the elementary school level, there
usually aren't "functions" involving academics, where parents are INVITED to
get involved. PTA meetings? They don't help a kid who's having problems with
math RIGHT NOW, and needs to get help RIGHT NOW, or suffer for the rest of
the school year.

What parents CAN do is ask lots of questions at home, to get a sense of
whether kids are actually learning new things, and whether they're being
taught to think and learn on their own. If not, parents can individually
arrange for the principal and teacher(s) to experience aggravation and
humiliation. Unfortunately though, you can't get a teacher replaced quickly
under the best of circumstances, so by the time a bad teacher is dumped, the
school year might be almost over and your kid's already damaged. What's a
parent to do?

Teach the kid yourself, at home, or find a tutor. If the kid's having
trouble getting over a small bump in the learning process, see if the kid
can spend a little after school time with a different teacher of the same
subject. Do anything, but don't do nothing. I wasn't happy with my kid's
English teacher in 9th grade, so I went over his written assignments every
single day, explaining why certain things looked clumsy less than
professional. He was an excellent speaker, but he wasn't transferring it to
the written page and the teacher was letting him get away with it. Spending
this time with him meant the pots & pans didn't always get washed the same
night they were used. Oh well.

If you can't find a tutor through the school, call the appropriate
department at another school system, or at a nearby college. My kid needed a
little help with physics, because his otherwise excellent teacher couldn't
explain a few things in a way that worked for my kid. We ended up spending a
few hours with the head of the physics department at a college. Problem
solved.

If you don't know your kid well enough to have a sense of when he/she is
feeling shaky about something, you're a low-life who probably spent too much
time watching TV instead of talking to your kid from birth onward. Don't
blame everything on the school.