Hello All! Here is my first Make Of It What You Will or #MOIWYW post. I have a feeling all of these are going to be written on the fly, as something comes to me and I get an itch to share it. That is exactly what happened this morning.
My daughter is participating in a class at her high school that meets outside of the regular class schedule. It is a class on studying the watershed and ends with a nine day camping, biking, hiking, and canoeing expedition that takes place this summer. As you can imagine, there is a teacher/parent meeting this spring so that parents can be fully informed of what exactly will occur over the course of these 9 days. On the sheet that gives the date of the meeting it reads: Mandatory parent meeting (This is a required meeting.)
This cracked me up because 1.) this is how bad it has gotten; and 2.) I was there at the beginning of the end.
Every year at recital time, I would hand out the Recital Packet. This packet included the dress rehearsal schedule and everything parents needed to know regarding the actual recital. I went from being able to assume that every parent knew dress rehearsal was mandatory (1989 -when I started teaching- to about 1996), and therefore not having to state that in the recital packet; to parents thinking dress rehearsal might be optional (1996 to 2001), and therefore started including the word mandatory in the dress rehearsal packet. At first, I could just capitalize the M and that was enough to get their attention, but by 2001, I had to capitalize and bold the entire word. And then came the moment in 2002, when a mother walked into my studio, dress rehearsal packet in hand, pointed to the word MANDATORY and, without irony or sarcasm, looked me in the face, one adult to another, and asked, “Does mandatory mean required?”
Thus dawned the age of parents coming to me full of reasons why their children were the exception for every mandatory event involved in being an enrolled dance student. Long gone were the days when children had to realize they couldn’t do two events that occurred on the same night. In other words, long gone were the days when children had to face the difficulty of choosing between activities, which forced them to consider which one actually meant the most to them.
But something more profound has been lost: the ability to teach children at a deep level. How often I have heard the words, “They got through it and everything was fine.” A suggestion that really knowing their dance wasn’t so important. They had fun, and that was good enough. I’m not talking here about the joy that skater Alysa Liu has discovered in her skating. I’m talking about having loose expectations so that children are not held accountable for what they’ve learned, the quality of their performance, or their flippant, nonchalant attitude.
Yet, at the same time when their children’s performance, or lack thereof, exposed this problem, it was my fault. Case in point.
In 2010, the penultimate year of my studio, absences in class due to conflicting activities skyrocketed. At dress rehearsal that year, I approached a group of parents after running their children’s dance. Their rehearsal had not gone well, as I had anticipated. Before I said anything, a mother who towered over me by at least 4 inches, started yelling at me, accusing me of wasting her money and her child’s time, and closed by shouting, “Obviously, your a crap dance teacher.” Little did she know, I had come prepared to illustrate to the parents of this class whose time had, in fact, been wasted.
“She is correct in saying that what you just saw was a bad dress rehearsal; and, I might add, not the kind of bad dress that bodes well for a good performance.” I opened my attendance book and told the group that while the lack of attendance by students was not unique to this class, they were by far the worst for the semester. I looked at the mother who had confronted me and said, “For instance, your daughter has missed 9 out of 16 classes for this semester.” I shared a few other students who had low attendance and then said, “I think you get the point. What has hurt the class the most however, is that this rehearsal, which is not supposed to be a teaching moment, but rather a staging moment, is the first time this entire semester that the whole class was in attendance together. So, just to be clear, this is the first time the class has practiced their dance together. A class, ideally should not be practicing their dance at dress rehearsal. That stage should be well-over by this point. That’s what allows them to perform their dance.”
I turned back to the woman who had called me a crap teacher (I honestly had not taken this personally as I knew it was meant to make me the problem and not her child, which is ultimately a reflection of her parenting and what she was teaching her daughter about what it meant to commit to an activity.), and said, “Do not judge my ability as a teacher until you have given me the ability to actually teach your child.”
That final comment encompasses the frustration of so many teachers I know. Their abilities are judged and based on trying to teach children who are 1.) not prepared to be taught, because it is now believed it is the teacher’s job to both prepare and teach the child; 2.) constantly being told that all adults in a position of authority are only there because they like to wield that authority, and therefore, defying that authority and doing things their way is self-advocating, alongside this is the message that rules are meaningless and restrictive (again, not talking about what Alysa Liu has done); 3.) know more than any generation before them, and thus it has become difficult to teach them what they don’t know; and 4.) the children of parents whose emotional age has continued to digress over the last two decades. It is so difficult to talk with a parent about an issues their child is having, when the parent enters that conversation from the emotional age of a high schooler.
What is doubly heartbreaking is that for two decades now, children have been lead to believe that doing something half-hearted and half-committed (which is inevitable when you are over-involved) equals deep-caring. And the teachers, who are desiring and capable of giving children a deep dive, which opens the door to deep-caring, are the ones being accused of not caring because we are insensitive to how wonderful, smart, and multi-talented these over-involved children are. Why are we insensitive? We want the present and with their full attention when we are teaching them.
Modern children have a lot going on, and it has become the teacher’s job to deal with that, by lessening the consequences the child will pay for it. At the end of the day, mediocrity is mediocrity no matter how you slice it or how you euphemize it or whether or not you own it.
That’s that for now, make of it what you will.
Constance
Constance Malloy 