‘Dear Miss Werry, I am so sorry about X. He is challenging us all at the moment. I would split him up too. I support your sanctions and eventually I would hope the message sinks into his immature head.
I feel I need to bring you wine for Friday. Good luck. I don't think he is a bad lad and I also don't think he realises that being an arsehole at school is so draining for everyone.
Yours is one of three detentions this week, so far. Again, apologies from me.
We are working hard to change his attitude toward school.’
This is an actual email received recently from the parent of one of my students – entirely unedited except for the student's name. Not only did it make me laugh, but I loved the unequivocal support shown by X's mum, and her understanding both of her son and my role as his teacher. X is, indeed, not a bad lad: he is a 12-year-old boy who is going through a distinctly silly phase, and I had put him in detention to do the work that he had declined to do in the scheduled lesson time.
Parental communication comes in many formats and flavours. Nowadays, teachers are more accessible to parents thanks to email – and this has opened a Pandora's box of home-to-school communication that wasn't previously there.
Contact with parents can be uplifting, and it is always a real boost when they get in touch to thank you for something you've done. I have kept some of the best examples of these communications, for those times when I need a reminder of why I do the job. At other times, though, parents can offer unsolicited advice about behaviour management, concert programming, or technical matters – such as the time when stereo was mansplained to me by a parent during the interval of a concert.
As we lurch towards the end of the school year, it is a good time to try to put things into perspective. Our main job is our duty towards our students and their education. That we cater to the dazzling variety of their needs with a reasonable efficiency and professionalism is a real achievement, especially given the sheer quantity of students that teachers – especially music teachers – encounter in the average week.
That students come in a package with parents and carers is unavoidable. It never used to be the case that many parents were particularly involved with school life or teachers’ work. I think that when I was at school myself, my parents contacted the school twice at most, and only ever ‘went up the school’ for parents’ evenings and concerts. However, attitudes have changed in the last couple of decades.
A lot has been said about ‘mission creep’ in schools: a widening of responsibility within education that is mirrored by an abdication of responsibility among some parents. Is this a cynical view? A much younger colleague recently hinted to me that I might just be turning into a grumpy middle-aged woman, and that my thoughts about 21st-century kids and parents could just be an accumulation of confirmation bias. Yikes.
So let's try to stick to the things we can be reasonably certain about. Yes, parental involvement with school has increased in recent years. This is sometimes really great, sometimes awful, and sometimes merely time-consuming. Yes, parents come in all varieties, as do our students, and it is our job to deal with them all as professionally as we can, even when they may not share our principles, or co-operate with our mission.
Music teachers usually have more students than teachers of many other subjects. Then there are yet more that are involved with our extra-curricular activities. Add to this the need, in the present climate, of justifying the place of music in the curriculum to students, parents, and the wider world. Not to mention the fact that teaching music is made more complicated by the fact that music is invisible and exists only in the fourth dimension.
‘I teach music – what's your superpower?’ No, I haven't actually got one of those t-shirts. But, when you look at all these factors, the job that we do is really quite amazing. Some parents get that. Students often do too, although we do what we do for their education, not their appreciation. The thing is to remember all those like X's mum. We must not let those students and parents who don't ‘get it’ to dominate the way that we feel about our work.
No matter what, we have earned our long summer break. And if X's mum brings you wine on Friday, you deserve that too.
