Great Throughts Treasury

"Respect is not carried in great, bold proclamations, but in small moments of surprising intimacy and empathy."

"Beneath the polite surface of parent-teacher conferences burns a cauldron of fiery feelings made particularly difficult because everyone carefully masks them and they seem inappropriate for the occasion."

"Beginning with the assumption that all children have ?special needs? is a kind of catalyst for bringing parents and teachers together on the same side."

"Dissonance between family and school, therefore, is not only inevitable in a changing society; it also helps to make children more malleable and responsive to a changing world. By the same token, one could say that absolute homogeneity between family and school would reflect a static, authoritarian society and discourage creative, adaptive development in children."

"Even though fathers, grandparents, siblings, memories of ancestors are important agents of socialization, our society focuses on the attributes and characteristics of mothers and teachers and gives them the ultimate responsibility for the child's life chances."

"Children should be present ? and given a voice ? at parent-teacher conferences."

"For those parents from lower-class and minority communities ... [who] have had minimal experience in negotiating dominant, external institutions or have had negative and hostile contact with social service agencies, their initial approaches to the school are often overwhelming and difficult. Not only does the school feel like an alien environment with incomprehensible norms and structures, but the families often do not feel entitled to make demands or force disagreements."

"First, they claim that their education did not offer a conceptual framework for envisioning the crucial role of families in the successful schooling of children? Second, teachers describe training in which there was no central value put on the crucial importance and complexity of building productive parent teacher relationships. Yes, there was always facile rhetoric about teachers needing to create alliances? but never a realization of the enormous opportunities and casualties that such an effort would entail?Third, teachers claim that their training never gave them tool and techniques, the practical guidance. [Why teachers feel ill-prepared to engage parents]"

"For parents, there is nothing more precious or more important than their child. They come to the meeting eager, often desperate, to hear good news about their child?s life in school."

"I also believe that the boundaries of school need to be made more porous and permeable, that we need to reduce the generational segregation that defines life and learning in our society."

"It's not uncommon that exits that are either forced exits that are not your choice or exits that don't feel as if they allow for completion, for appreciation, for reflection, make people feel as if they are very, very alone. And one of the things that people talked about in my own work was the need to create some kinds of rites and rituals, some kinds of ceremonies that allow us to recognize the often very paradoxical sensations of leaving: the loss of it and the liberation of it, whether it's forced or whether it's chosen."

"It was much later that I realized Dad?s secret. He gained respect by giving it. He talked and listened to the fourth-grade kids in Spring Valley who shined shoes the same way he talked and listened to a bishop or a college president. He was seriously interested in who you were and what you had to say."

"In our own individual development, the trajectory of our life stories [has] within them these entrances and exits, you know, that at each time when we are moving into a next stage in our lives, there is this tug of war between moving forward and staying put, between progression and regression. Eric Erikson, a very famous psychologist, talked about this 50 years ago. And to move forward to the next level, we need to exit. So exit is a moment of great propulsion."

"Parents come to school bearing the haunts of their early experiences."

"Parent-teacher conferences are highly ritualized events, and like most rituals, the form and content can become symbolic or substantive, routine or revelatory, limiting or liberating."

"Mothers seem to be in subtle competition with teachers. There is always an underlying fear that teachers will do a better job than they have done with their child.... But mostly mothers feel that their areas of competence are very much similar to those of the teacher. In fact they feel they know their child better than anyone else and that the teacher doesn't possess any special field of authority or expertise."

"Productive collaborations between family and school, therefore, will demand that parents and teachers recognize the critical importance of each other's participation in the life of the child. This mutuality of knowledge, understanding, and empathy comes not only with a recognition of the child as the central purpose for the collaboration but also with a recognition of the need to maintain roles and relationships with children that are comprehensive, dynamic, and differentiated."

"Part of teaching is helping students learn how to tolerate ambiguity, consider possibilities, and ask questions that unanswerable."

"Schooling is what happens inside the walls of the school, some of which is educational. Education happens everywhere, and it happens from the moment a child is born--and some people say before--until a person dies."

"Teachers need to recognize the complex, layered conversation and anticipate the parents? internal, often unspoken confusion."

"The predictable consequence in such situations is that children usually embrace the familiar home culture and reject the unfamiliar school culture, including its academic components and goals."

"The ambiguous, gray areas of authority and responsibility between parents and teachers exacerbate the distrust between them. The distrust is further complicated by the fact that it is rarely articulated, but usually remains smoldering and silent."

"These generational echoes are double-edged for both parents and teachers. They are a source of both guidance and distraction, insight and bias. They sometimes lead to important breakthroughs and discoveries in the conversation, and at other times force an abrupt breakdown and impasse."

"There is no better, more convincing evidence of a child?s progress, then to have him or her present and participating when parents and teachers come together."

"There must be a profound recognition that parents are the first teachers and that education begins before formal schooling and is deeply rooted in the values, traditions, and norms of family and culture."

"Teachers worry a lot about conferences. It is the arena of their work where they often feel the most unprepared and exposed."

"Whether outside work is done by choice or not, whether women seek their identity through work, whether women are searching for pleasure or survival through work, the integration of motherhood and the world of work is a source of ambivalence, struggle, and conflict for the great majority of women."

"We tend to ignore and diminish endings? [while celebrating beginnings. We should] develop the habit of marking the small goodbyes to help us master the larger farewells."

"Views of women, on one side, as inwardly directed toward home and family and notions of men, on the other, as outwardly striving toward fame and fortune have resounded throughout literature and in the texts of history, biology, and psychology until they seem uncontestable. Such dichotomous views defy the complexities of individuals and stifle the potential for people to reveal different dimensions of themselves in various settings."