Teacher Journals #1

Parental Interaction Thus Far…

This first quarter, I have not had a lot of interaction with the parents of my students. I just have not made the time to interact with them as much as I should. I have not made any calls home and I have seen the parents very little at school or outside of school in the community. In the future I would like for this to change in a positive way.

One way in which I have communicated with the parents of my students on a consistent basis is through the use of daily communication logs. It has not been ideal, because I have found it to be repetitive, mundane, and time-consuming. It also pressures me to think up things to say about students, when I generally feel like writing two to three sentences. I have been using composition notebooks as these communication logs that get sent home with students. For two students they are very useful means of communication, because their parents ask all kinds of questions and write back little notes or requests back to me. So they are actually good tools for “communication”. However two students lost or never brought back the communication logs since the beginning of the year, and the other three students’ parents just choose not to write anything back anything in the logs. For the rest of the year, I plan on using notebooks with sheets in them where I can check off activities worked on in class, and then have a space where comments can be written by me and response comments can be written by parents. I will also call home to parents, with the students in mind who lost or never returned their original communication logs, to communicate the change and to expect something new to be coming home in their student’s backpacks.

I have had one awkward phone conversation with a father who told me that his child was distressed at school because an older sibling beat them up, but not to worry because he “took care of it”. That worried me and I did not know how to handle that. So since then I have been very suspicious that some of this student’s behaviors are caused by abuse happening at home. Plus I have also learned that the ethnic culture that this student comes from is very harsh towards children with special needs, counting them as “half-people”. So I wonder if the student can comprehend that and if that comes across in any interactions with their family. I know this is nothing I can control, but it really stinks for a child to have to go through that.

Two of my students are Hispanic and their parents only speak Spanish. So my interactions with them go through translation, which just really limits what I can do as far as communicating. It even dictates what I do as far as sending stuff home. I always make sure there is some Spanish or very simple English in home communications.

Then to top these difficulties off, I have a very “high-maintenance” family who talks at you, not so much to you or with you. Every encounter I have had with them I am very stressed out and tense because I have only heard how mad they get and that they only believe in data, and any opinions you might have might as well be kept inside unless you have a doctoral degree in the subject.

I really just need to talk with my parents more. I talk to one parent everyday because they are a bus driver, so we chat after school about their child and how they behave in class. I even get to hear very funny stories. I feel like that is a very good relationship, but my other parental relationships are not strong. They are not negative, but not as strong as I think they should be. I really need to work on that the rest of this school year.