by Clay Reeves

Created on: April 28, 2008

I've been a teacher for 42 years, and I sense sometimes that there is an ever-widening gulf growing between parents and teachers. Parents don't always seem to trust us, and we teachers are sometimes too quick to blame parents for the kids who fail. I had a professor in college who once said: "If you have a kid who fails your class, it is your fault and no one else's!" Wow! What a pressure-filled statement that was! What he was saying, of course, was that we would sometimes really have to work hard to motivate our students, exercising all of the creativity we could muster. At the same time, we would have to counterbalance society's challenges - peer pressure, drugs, television, movies, video games, iPods, not to mention hormones, selfishness, and laziness! And...we would have to do all of that without much help from exhausted and exasperated parents, who would have issues of their own. We would have to deal with "the good, the bad, and the ugly" in our relationships with parents, because they wouldn't always know what to do either.

But...we teachers can't do it alone! I like to think of myself as a reasonably capable teacher, caring and hard-working, with only the best interests of my students in mind, but I see the kids only a relatively short period of time each day. Moms and dads have them the rest of the time, and their help is absolutely essential and necessary. I can't be there to answer all of their questions with homework(or make sure that they even do it), and I don't even begin to understand all of the pressures that kids face these days. If they aren't being urged to try alcohol or sex or drugs, they're expected to have the latest cell phone with which to text friends and wear the latest (and most expensive) fashions. And...all of them these days seem to have a My Space page, with all of the possible dangers that can bring. If parents and teachers don't learn to work together, the kids end up fighting their battles without adult supervision and guidance - a most dangerous situation!

I once had a mom tell me: "I hope you can do something with him! I've just about given up! I'm going to send him to his grandparents if something doesn't change soon!" What a sad story! She had completely forgotten about her own responsibilities and was expecting some sort of miracle from me. I did the best I could with him, and I think we accomplished some good things that year, but it would have been much, much better if his mom had been more cooperative. She spent a lot

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