To be feed up with school telling me what to do and how to do it?

[ivykaty44]

Had a letter home from my dd's school last week telling me that they would be sending a booklet home telling me what I should be giving my dd for her packed lunch. I do know how to make a healthy pack lunch, including three portions of fruit each day in the pack lunch.

This week they send me a letter telling me that it is tantamount to being a criminal if I so much as dare to even think about taking my dd out of school during term time - I havn't even asked (standard letter to take home)and my child may be excluded from school if I go on holiday in term time.

The letter really does seem to have this attitude of "we have the power to make you" and I really don't like it I am not a child, I can look after my dd and give her healthy food and take her on holiday during school closures. I just want them to leave me alone and get on with teaching my dd........ rant over

i wish, I wish.

Oh well. I've skimmed the thread and I can't bring myself to get involved because I know I will get angry and sad at responses like one of the very early ones from worzella. Some knee jerk, rude 'oh FGS get a grip' type of response.

ivykate you are so right and I would come and help you out on this thread if I could but I have a sea of letters from school to plough through telling me what I must and mustn't do.

Then I've got a massive pile of grey telfon trousers and polyester shirts to iron.

Ggrrrrr! These jobsworth, officous, rule-laden, sheep herding attitudes really grate with me. Some people seem to thouroughly enjoy them and it's those people who get weirdly shirty on threads like this.

Good luck. I'm with you in spirit.

martianbishop, please read my responses, I give my reasons.

What more can I say, life is like that, everyone has to bend sometimes, I asked for the work, eg worksheet at this age for ME to work through with the children.

Now everyone go get a cup of tea and a breather! and play nicely

But the teacher wll still have to findan appropriate sheet, which may well not be the work she used in the class, copy it, send it to you and mark the resulting work.

Why don't you borrow another child's book and do the copying yourself, get your child to do it, and mark it?

See, it's the assumption that the teacher's carefully planned lesson can be boiled down into a worksheet that is a bit irritating.

quite. that is all we do, you know , is hand out bloody work sheets.

Yes, individualism is fun (and sometimes necessary), but it comes at a price.

Maybe you do provide healthy lunches, or never ever take your children out of school, and help out in whatever way you can, but there are plenty of people who don't. Schools are not in the habit of sending out personal letters to people whose behaviour is potentially upsetting the integrity of the school community, so everyone gets them, and the school hopes that the people whose children are routinely high as kites on sugar, are routinely absent or late, or are utterly unsupportive to the point of obstructiveness, might just get the message and start singing from the same hymn sheet.

The point is that a school is a community, and a community runs on rules. Rules are not flexible, nor should they be. They are there to govern the life of the community. You may question the reason behind a rule, but if you choose to ignore it rather than challenge it in an adult way (eg join the PTA or become a governor), then you are merely confusing your child, and teaching them that is OK to be an individual at the expense of the community.

Teachers and schools are not the enemy. They are the junior face of the entire community. If your child is marginalised at school, they may grow up perfectly fine, but they may also grow up lacking the ability to join their community. In my opinion, that would be doing them a disservice to encourage to regularly flout rules.

As to the suggestion that teachers owe it to pupils and parents to provide catch-up work after a term-time holiday, I can only snort and suggest that parents who find that entirely reasonable take some time to volunteer in their child's school to see first hand how much spare time teachers have...

In short, if you have a clear conscience, then you should not feel concerned by seemingly insulting letters. Yes, there really are parents who need letters written that simply.

"I have asked the teachers to give me the work that they missed so they can catch up"

oh no. That's not part of the deal. You miss it, tough

Obviously it is different if a child is ill, or for that matter if a child finds a particular area of study hard. I give up time to help, as do all of the other teachers that I work with, and I bet all the teachers who post on MN do the same.

But when someone chooses to take their child out of school, and then expects me to give up my time to help the child catch up, I tend to feel that they are taking the piss.
If they are 'in the driving seat' as cheeset said they can do the driving.

a worksheet? What if they haven't used a single worksheet that week? What then?

Yes. My lesson tomorrow for year 10, for example.

They have a starter activity which involves using the key words we learned in the last lesson.

They then watch a 3 minute film on the symptoms of Cystic fibrosis. We will then spend 10 minutes working on the genetics of Cystic fibrosis This is all done using internet sources. They will then complete a fact sheet on CF aimed at a teenage audience, listing the symptoms and treatment.

they then use our interactive textbook to reserach three different ways of administering gene therapy to people with CF.

in the last 15 mintes of the lesson they do use a work sheet, one that I wrote, that links to a BBC repost of new genetic tecniwies in the treatment of breast cancer.

Their summary activity is to share the reserach that they have done with the rest of the class.

This is in a 70 minute lesson

'That's not part of the deal. You miss it, tough'- Pointydog,is that the opinion a school takes, is this in black and white?

Please, I asked for last weeks homework, why be so hung up on this?

Are there any sane people out there, speak now, I mean the fencesitters!

My dd is yr 1, ds yr 6. Im sure they can catch up now really, I use BBC Skillswise for my kids and other web educational stuff NOW please be rational!

I am being rational. You took her out of school, you get her to catch up. If it is so easy for the teacher, it must be just as easy for you.

Of course they can catch up. No-one is saying they can't. And if you have just asked for missed homework, and that's it, then I might let you off

mb...the most wonderful teacher that my son had last year , when in year 6, often let him do his homework at school, whilst she was preparing her lesson or whatever she had to do, and she would always be willing to help him out and she was just the most wonderful teacher ever....and we will be eternally greatful for her encouragement and all the time she spend helping him, etc...things she didn't have to do...
nothing really to do wiht this topic, just wanted to say that some people do appreciate these things

she sounds fantastic.

Not a fencesitter on this one I'm afraid cheeset. I don't take my kids out of school in term-time. Or expect teachers to make up the time later.

However I think that things that the school has set rules for (uniform and holidays for example) are quite different from the contents of a child's lunchbox.

Well I suppose if you think it's OK for schools to send out communications which are terribly patronising in tone, then you think that most parents are the sort that need to be patronised.

Because the obvious thing, si that schools should address their tone to the majority. Fair enough, they don't have the resources to do individual letters to every subgroup.

Are most parents really stupid, do we think?

I think depressingly, the answer may be yes. But I really want to believe the answer may be no. I want to be hopeful and optimistic about the human race. (Though the older I get the less optimistic I am, this is normal, isn't it?)

But it does seem a little like lowering our aspirations, addressing all communications to the most stupid, rathr than the most intelligent. Practical, but sad. And also, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. People respond to how you treat them. Every good manager knows that. That's why some workplaces are filled with whinging moaning negative gits and others are filled with dynamic, constructive can-do people. Which one would we rather work in? Which one would we like to work towards?

she is, and I am so gutted she left the school...but well....she is to lovely , so, shan't hold it against her

My son had been lagging behind since he started in reception and whilst in previous schools they also worked with him, etc....she really worked wonders with him...

TBH, your post struck a chord.

I am deeply saddened at the things that we have to ask parents to do, or to avoid doing. Some of themseem so basic it hurts the brain to even think of them in passing.

We have actually had to ask parents not to send their children into school with alcohol in the run up to christmas, as there was a rather distressing run of the silly beggers sending their kids into school with liquer filled chocolates, for the rest of the class. In year 8!

That was a good one.

lol @ the 'I worked for a charity too' comments. Hadn't noticed them.

But Bella and I are right and you is wrong

A worksheet doesn't replace a missed lesson. A request for a worksheet is probably to make the parent feel a bit better. Nothing to do with learning at all.

God this is the depressing thing.

At which point in our culture did it become the norm to be so badly behaved that parking on the yellow zigzags, feeding your children properly etc., was something you had to be told not to do?

And yet, if you speak to people as if you expect them to behave well, sometimes that works. Not always, but sometimes. I suppose the balance is between realism and optimism.