Dear Doctor Love,
I am a teacher at a San Pedro elementary school. I am seriously considering whether or not to go back to teaching in the fall term because I am starting to get burned out.
Every time I talk to a tourist, they ask me about the quality of the school and whether or not the children are getting a good education. My stock response is, “We provide them with a good education but all we can do is teach them. We can’t force them to learn it.”
The point I am trying to make is that the education that is provided to a child here is probably as good as anywhere else in the world. Our children are still under-educated, considering the subjects and the teachers that they have but we get very little cooperation from the parents. We need to somehow get the parents to understand that they have to make the children study at home and do their homework.
The parents of the children in our schools that read your column need to know that it is as much their responsibility as it is mine to educate their child.
/s/ Stressed
Dear Stressed,
Your point is well taken and is one that should be understood by every parent with a child in school. Education is a partnership between the parent and the school. The school provides an education that teaches the same basic subjects taught in schools from the USA to China. This includes language, math and science.
So what is the difference in what makes a student learn more at some schools and less in others? In California one controversial subject is the question of why Oriental students test so much higher than the other students in the California school system. The other students come from a mixed background of mostly Latino, black and white Americans. In the long run the answer was found to be that Oriental parents were much more involved in their children’s education than in other cultures. In other words, they held their kid’s noses to the grindstone and made sure they learned what they were supposed to learn.
It is a simple as that. Parents; don’t blame the teachers. They provide the material but it is up to you to make your offspring learn it.