Things Look This Way to Me

Editorial by J.B. McKinley 8/30/07

Starting the School Year

The buses are on the road again. Parents have swarmed WalMart for supplies and treated some lucky kids to shopping sprees at brand name stores for school wear. To the best of our abilities, all of us parents have done our duty and prepared our kids for another year of what is really their work. Yep, you read that right. Consider telling your kids to look at school not as time they must spend in childcare with a teacher as a monitor. Instead, try telling them that just as you, as a parent, go to work to keep them fed and the household running,  their job is to go to school and prepare to support themselves and their future families.

Does a kid understand this? I don’t know, but I do think that school should not be just a fun time watching creative adults cater to the class. Of course, neither should it be a deadly boring duty without the possibility of a smile or laugh.  A balance should be struck. Still, regardless of what your child faces as he trudges in through the homeroom door (that is if they still have homerooms?), they should go into the classroom knowing he or she is expected to take part and learn. Just as you have likely had good bosses and bad bosses, he or she will have good teachers and bad teachers. He might have teachers he doesn’t  like. She might have teachers she doesn’t respect. Nevertheless, your children are now in a system, just as we all are, and we must live with it and win.

We’ve all heard a tremendous amount about “No Child Left Behind,” no doubt those following school issues are heartily sick of the phrase. It’s a phrase that suggests an incredibly optimistic outcome, but let me suggest, totally without pointing fingers, that children do get left behind. It’s up to us to figure out if it’s our kid!

What’s the point of this pontificating? The point is that the first day of school, despite our parental “in” jokes, is not the day we exclaim “Lucky Day, Lucky Day!” and wash our hands of our children for most of a year. It should be the day we re-dedicate ourselves to helping our kids grow up through the  school system,  cooperating with it and despite some aspects of it. So, by the time open house evening rolls around this fall,  make sure your child’s teachers won’t have to ask you your name. That’s a good sign.