Calum Henderson

Parents are the people that will see the students in your class more than you will, and they will have a much greater influence over you students then you ever will.

Recently in the Public vs Private series, I have done two posts on parents. One on parents who care too much, and one on parents that don’t care enough. This is the final post on parents, and will cover why they matter in deciding where you will be teaching.

As a teacher, you will be interacting directly with your class for up to 4.5 hours a day, or 22.5 hours a week. These interactions will be mostly in the classroom and in a formal setting, and you will be expecting a certain level of interaction from your students. That is that you will be expecting them to show up to class, and to do homework, and to have the materials available for them to do these things.

Parents will be interacting with your students for significantly longer than you will be. If the parents of students don’t care about education, then it is highly likely that the students won’t care about education. And therefore your interactions with your students will be scared by this.

Parents matter in deciding where to teach, before deciding to teach at a school. Try to gauge what the parents will be like, and take this factor into consideration.

Parents will have the greatest influence on your students, so you need to consider them.

Read more posts in this series at Public vs Private | Main Page.

Parents matter in deciding where you want to teach.

Recently I wrote a post about parents at schools that care too much about their child’s education (here). This is the opposing post, about those parents who don’t care enough. Here are some characteristics of parents that don’t care enough.

Parents who don’t care enough

• Students may not value education as their parents don’t.
• This may lead to students not showing up to class very often, and as their is no support for education from home, there is no easy solution.
• Discipline is a challenge as students don’t fear the consequences and are not reprimanded by parents.
• Parents don’t give any support to students or to teachers, and so teachers can feel alone in situations.
• Parents don’t keep teachers accountable, and so teachers may be tempted to be lazy.
• Students may not have proper resources such as pens and pencils with which to work, and so learning may be compromised.

These are some characteristics of parents who don’t care. I don’t know of any private school where teachers don’t care (if you pay that much then you care). But unfortunately there is a minority of (not all) public schools in which there are some parents like this.

Stay tuned for one final post on parents, about why parents matter in making the decision on where to teach.

You can read the rest of the posts in this series at Public vs Private | Main Page.