Reply to How to deal with a teacher who doesn't want to deal with parents

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
 14:40 again. Just to give you some perspective, most developed countries have that kind of stay-out mentality. Teaching is left to the professionals, and parents are not welcome in schools, to interfere, distract or even be asked to grade assignments, which is a huge breach of privacy.

As you know, the US is way behind a lot of countries, developed and otherwise, in international high school achievement tests. Looking at the big picture, keeping parents out of schools doesn't hurt.

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Good point.  OP, when your child is being examined by a doctor, do you feel the need/right to ask the doctor the methods and rationale for his/her approach/procedures and the order of events in the treatment?  I'm guessing you probably have confidence in the doctor's expertise, and you understand that the doctor's time is valuable, so he/she is not expected to give you a detailed play-by-play.[/quote]

At first blush I thought this was ironic.  Then I realized you were serious.  If I questioned or didn't understand the course of treatment you are damn right I insert myself and ask questions.  And if you don't then, respectfully, you aren't doing your job as a parent.  The amount of commentary on the importance of managing and owning your own healthcare is staggering.

P.S. You should be an active participant in your own healthcare as well.[/quote]

You don't understand the point I was attempting to make.

Yes, of course I ask questions if I don't understand the course of treatment.  However, I don't expect the doctor to give me a play-by-play on a routine appointment, and I don't need to know what time the doctor is going to process or send off blood work after I leave, or what kind of instruments are in the cabinets, or what brand of cotton swab is being used, etc.  My point is that people generally respect the time of other professionals, and they respect the professional's training and expertise, yet for some reason these same people expect teachers to devote much more time to chatter and communication about things that aren't essential and only detract from the time the teacher would otherwise spend planning/teaching.  Classroom daily schedules (center times, carpet times, recess times, etc.) are NOT equivalent to a complicated medical treatment that would warrant intense and time consuming communication.  They are more the equivalent of listening to a kid's heart during a routine check-up.  It enrages me when people treat teachers as domestic staff rather than professionals.

Oh, and if someone else was taking up my doctor's time by asking inane questions about when exactly during a typical routine treatment he would listen to a kid's heart, and why the doctor had photographs of an owl on the wall, and when the doctor planned to update the window treatments in the office, I would hope that the doctor would "discourage communication" with that individual so that time could be spent on doing the things the doctor is trained to do.  [/quote]

I'm a professional.  My time is very valuable.  I am very, very senior and own a huge P&L (size matters sometimes).  And I think my time is valuable.  And the people who work for me's time is valuable.  And people ask me and my team inane questions all day because we have an expertise they do not and we are relied on to treat them all professionally and respectfully and find ways to make them and their queries feel valuable and relevant. Sometimes I have to push them off for a while but I've never said or heard said about my profession what you assert is true about teachers.  And anyone who operated in my org with the attitude espoused above would be counseled to change, and terminated if they couldn't adapt.  It amazes me that teachers (and their little parrot supporters) seem to think that they are the only people who get treated like that.

P.S. You picked a bad analogy to make your point.  While I respect that you doubled down, you set yourself up for failure with that choice.   [/quote]

Not the PP you were responding to, but you're missing the point completely. You don't allow non-experts to barge into your office and "help" you, do you? Just as you wouldn't expect a non-medic to treat you at the doctor's office? There are HUGE privacy and expertise concerns. Well, parents in a classroom are like that - they are not trained educators, and an hour of volunteer training does not make them that. The customer service you're implementing is probably what this teacher is implementing - except teachers are so hounded these days that she felt the need to set boundaries at the start of the year. No blame to her AT ALL.

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