The start of the school year always brings many hundreds of new children onto our Campuses over an exciting few days. It’s hard not to feel the energy when our enrolling students and their families meet their new teachers, seek out new friends, and get to explore the options ahead. Mostly it is smiles and laughter, but there is also a very understandable nervousness – 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 ahead.
The tension is, I would suggest, quite different to other situations. As a parent, when I meet teachers it is not like meeting lawyers, accountants or other professionals – because my kids spending so much time with teachers, away from me, makes me vulnerable as a parent in ways that are not immediately obvious. Similarly, teachers can be anxious as they know children who will go and talk about them with their parents;
The similarities may not always be clear to parents who aren’t teachers or to teachers with no children. And even as a teacher and parent for more than two decades, I realised I had only been dimly aware of this when I read, over the vacation this fascinating comparison by Mark Thompson and Mazzola Fox, on the symmetries of anxieties here:
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Parents
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Teachers
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 mirrored anxieties exist. In fact, it’s far better than indifference. There’s probably not much we can do about that, nor should we try to.
We should, however, acknowledge that despite differing perspectives we have a common root of shared hopes for the children in our care. The cure for anxieties such as the one 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 brick in the path toward our strategic 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 always a work of renewal. Seeing that we all share the same hopes and fears will help.
