Speakout Columns

The importance of involved parents

Mar 2, 2006 12:07 PM

EDITOR’S NOTE — The following essay is one of scores of interesting and diverse commentaries that was recently posted on Edwize.org, the UFT blog. Jackie Bennett is chapter leader at the Petrides School on Staten Island.

By JACKIE BENNETT

It’s a funny thing about parental involvement, speaking personally, at least. Both of my parents were teachers. They could not have cared less about my grades.

After grade school, they only attended teacher conferences if I dragged them, and they always got me to the winter concerts 20 minutes into the festivities, so that my most distinct memories of chorus all involve slipping onto the stage when the song was halfway through.

When the teachers tried to skip me a grade in 1st grade, my parents refused, saying, “Leave her alone, she’s just a little kid,” and when the school had the brilliant idea of sending me to some summer enrichment program for gifted kids (me and every other kid, probably), they told me I’d be nuts if I attended. That was in 3rd grade.

And every year, when June came around, my mother would pick me up on the last day of school and say, “Thank God that’s over, now I have you home with me again. Let’s go to the beach.”

And yet, my parents were deeply involved in my education. I’d step onto the patio, or into the den, and my father would be there reading, so I’d pick up my book.

He wasn’t reading so that I would read, of course; he was just reading because he liked to read. It was what he did, and so it became what I did. And then he would put down the book and talk to me about it, not because he wanted me to learn something but because he liked talking and he liked ideas. And my mother? Same thing, when she got around to sitting down.

The reading was everywhere and all the time, and the trips to the library were ritual. But there was another thing they did that was just as important for my education. And that is this: they ate dinner with me every night.

Well, not just with me, of course. I have two brothers and a sister, and there was a live-in grandfather, too. No one listened at dinner, but everyone talked, and it was loud and raucous and mostly it was about politics, and sometimes there were fights, and once or twice my sister left the table crying because my father would tease her about her hair and say she looked like Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

No one was trying to educate me, but it was happening anyway because I was spending an awful lot of time in the presence of adults. There were ideas flying about the table, and I heard about the wider world, the world of my father’s war experiences in China, and of my mother’s memories; there was something besides being 10 years old.

And, maybe even more important, there were so many words at dinner, thousands of words, millions of words, and I heard them all in complex sentences. No one had to do a word wall and a share out — I got it all at home, and education, like the words, was (to use some pedagogical parlance) embedded in the text.

To my mind, my education has always been the greatest gift my parents gave me, but they only rarely took a step inside my schools.

Can everyone get that kind of education? No. I was lucky (or at least I think I was). Although I do sometimes see my own mother and father in the attitudes of the parents that I meet, it’s a rare thing, indeed. Many parents — even when they share my parents’ inclinations to learn — are overwhelmed by their own lives. They are learning a new language, or working midnight shifts, or they are dealing with dying parents, or divorce, or illness. Life happens. It doesn’t stop just because a baby is born.

But my point is this: As parents, it’s not so much concern about our children’s education we need to worry about, as concern about our own. Do we have curious and restless minds? If not, why should our children?

If parents look on education as cod liver oil — nasty medicine they are loathe to take themselves; if parents mistake grades for education, and see college acceptance as the appropriate commodity to add to the big house and the fancy car and the flat-screened TV they spend most of their day in front of, then it isn’t really education that they’re after, and access to the schools (important as that is) might not make much difference in the end.

None of that is to say parents shouldn’t be involved. I love to see parents at school. Everyone has my e-mail address — all my kids and any parent who wants it. I even give it out on Open School Night. I’m just wondering if the best involvement doesn’t take place right in the house.

I leave you with an anecdote about my mom. Always chary of ambition, my parents teased my brother endlessly, because he had this thing about wanting to be at the top of the class all the time. My mother would say, “What are you, money mad?” She equated the grade chase with the future money chase, and turned her back.

I didn’t agree with my mother over much in the 44 years I knew her. But I certainly agreed with her on that.