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When is Parent Day?

It’s Parent Day today.

Ok. Parent Day was Tuesday of American Education Week and I fell behind my schedule for getting this up, but still. It’s Parent Day.

I remember when I first started teaching sometime in the late 1800s when one of the moms of one of my 4th graders came to the class to apologize. She had always been The Room Mother for her kids, but this year she was working outside the home, and she was apologizing for not being able to be involved.

I said, “You’re going to be involved, because you’re a good mom. You don’t have to be a school volunteer to be involved. I’m a working mom, too, and I’m involved with my kids’ education because I make sure they do their homework and that they don’t watch too much TV and I ask what they’re doing at school, and I make them tell me. You do that every day, and it’s the best parent involvement a teacher could ask for.”

We love it when parents get involved. But just as things have changed in the world so that there are fewer and fewer stay-home parents who can even think about being school volunteers, schools, themselves, need to recognize how when they need to change to involve parents.

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42 Things to Get Your Kid Ready for School

There are different rituals for different families at this season of the year. When I was little, I got a new pair of shoes and a new “outfit”. My brothers got new “clothes” because, as they explained to me with a sneer, boys don’t wear “outfits” after the age of two. students in hallway

Mom took her six kids to K-Mart and we each picked out a notebook and pencils and crayons and a ruler and a pencil box to keep it all in. That was pretty much it.

We were pretty much ready to go back to school. Twenty years later, it was pretty much the same when I got my sons ready to go back to school. But now, twenty years past that, I wonder if “pretty much ready” is enough.

Is there something else a parent can do to prepare the kids for a successful year?

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All that fuss about Obama’s speech

The President spoke to America’s students as they begin the school year. I’ve been asked 3,000 times today what all the fuss was about. Why was talk radio and the TV talking heads going full-speed, damn the torpedoes, take no prisoners on… the President’s message to school children that they are responsible for showing up. Doing their homework. Behaving themselves.

And the answer is: I have no idea.

I’m not going to try to speak for them. I’m going to speak for myself as a Utah teacher. I loved President Obama’s speech to school children. I got tears in my eyes when he reminded them that we’ve been struggling with the proper ways to hold teachers accountable for being good teachers and to hold parents accountable for being good parents and hold politicians accountable for being good policy makers. But that there’s one group we sometimes forget to hold accountable for doing what they’re supposed to do. Students.

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