90s27 Notes

From the time I started working as principal at Longfellow Elementary I kept a legal pad on my desk. On it I recorded every encounter with students, parents, teachers and others. I still have all of those notes as well as my journals from those days. Those are the places I go first when writing about that time in my life.

Those notes were a reference point for me when talking to people and referring to previous incidents or discussions. Writing about things not only aids your memory, it facilitates organization and clarifies thinking.

The notepads chronicle our shift away from self-contained special education classes to near full inclusion in regular education classrooms. It includes meetings with staff and parents and notes about incidents with students. I also kept notes on any phone calls I got.

The logs are full of parent requests to have their child advanced in a content area, usually math, or be whole grade advanced. I made notes about the parent request, the meetings I had with teachers about it, and the final meeting I had with the parents.

I think every parent thinks his or her child is special in some way. They are advocates for their child as all good parents should be. They often don’t have many other children to compare to so they make their judgments on the information they do have. Schools have hundreds, if not thousands, of kids to include in the comparison and have an accurate sense of where each child is.

In my career I have seen kids advanced in a content area or full grade. Rarely have I, or any of my colleagues that I am aware of, seen any significant advantage in these advancements. More often than not we have seen a negative impact when kids are moved outside their peers.

Parents don’t seem to care what we think. Many times they are doing it because they have heard of another child that was advanced and want to be able to say their child was advanced in a class or grade. In all of the cases I only had one child who wanted to do it. It was always the parent pushing them to be advanced.

Parents pressured teachers and their own children to be advanced. I heard every possible reason why it was the right thing to do from my child is bored to I know my child is smarter than all of the other kids in class because I have talked to those kids.

I have never figured out what the hurry was. I believe being a well-rounded and successful adult has nothing to do with being in the top math class or being advanced a grade level. I had a friend who was the registrar at the University Iowa. He told me, quite emphatically, to stop sending them kids who were academically ready but not socially and emotionally ready for college life.

Generally, these parents are the same ones who push their kids to be involved in and to be the best at everything they do. Not a bad ambition but totally unreasonable. The kids grow up neurotic and dysfunctional.