Josh Fullan is the director of Maximum City, a national education and engagement organization.
First, the small round table where she sits with her kindergarten coterie on chairs with tennis balls on their feet. Then the wallpaper display of cartoon crocodiles, each one coloured by a different classmate. An activity station with baskets of art supplies. “These markers smell SO good, Daddy.” When she was done showing me around, my daughter wandered over to her teacher’s desk to sneak a look while no one was there. I stood silent, taking in the material goodness of the stuff around me.
In the fatal sweep of a global pandemic, not seeing your kid’s classroom is perhaps a small sacrifice, a manufactured crisis amid multiple real ones. But now that some schools and child care centres are starting to figure out how to let parents and other guests back in as they remove the insular armour of COVID restrictions one layer at a time, some parents are getting an in-person glimpse of what they were missing.
A classroom is also a community, and communities are strongest when all members participate. As a parent, I am only an honorary member of my daughter’s classroom, but a full-fledged member of the broader school community. When school communities don’t include parents – for whatever reason – they suffer.
Leave education to educators. Not some dropout parent with a high school grudge or idiot politician.
Sanity
This and more, go to parent council meetings. I perhaps missed about five in 19 years. I learned so much, made good friends and got to have some input here and there.
Public sector with union is an ever growing cancer tumor of Canada 🇨🇦
Ah we are lied to by our school daily. Trying to communicate with teachers in some cases (not all for sure) is near impossible. It took us 2 months to reach a teacher then to be told be told about issues we could have been helping with and had asked to help with from day 1.