PoAC Teacher/parent rant: staying home

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There are a few good reasons to keep your child home from school, or to pick your child up/allow them to come home early. Illness, obviously, tops the list, followed by appointments that can't be scheduled outside school hours. Religious holidays that you observe, that aren't part of the school calendar, are fine too. (Orthodox Easter and Eid come to mind. I usually plan review days for those days, so that the kids who will be away won't have much to catch up on. I don't think it's fair to give them a holiday and then make them catch up on a ton of stuff from it.) It's important to train kids from early grades to find out what they will be missing or what they have missed, and ensure that they catch up - hopefully, if it's a scheduled event that more than one person is missing school for, there won't be much. That's a life skill, and skipping it does them no favours.

It is not, however, acceptable to tell your child that it is okay if they come home after pictures have been taken on picture day; that they may leave at lunchtime if there's an assembly in the afternoon that they aren't involved in; that they can leave after the field trip gets back, even if there's another hour of school time; you get the idea. Similarly, allowing them to stay home all day because the alarm didn't go off and they missed the bus, is a bad idea. If there's any possible way to get them to school late, they need to go.

Why? Well, let's think about lessons, here. School is on the list of things that just are. Like death and taxes, it's a part of life, neither a reward nor a punishment but just something kids do. (Assuming, of course, that you're not homeschooling - if you are, I would submit that the equivalent lesson is that learning needs to take place every day, no matter what.) If you let your child come home after the pictures have been taken, you're sending several messages. The first is that nothing important happens after pictures are taken; the rest of the day is a waste. The second is that routines can be changed when special things are happening (I'll get back to this one in a minute.) The third is that school is optional sometimes. The fourth is that pictures can be expected to make the child feel bad enough that they need to come home afterward, as though they're sick.

Now, in order: teachers get really annoyed when a day that has already been disrupted, is disrupted further by unnecessary comings and goings. I don't schedule tests for picture day, but I DO schedule regular learning and missing that for spurious reasons is not acceptable. It's a waste of the time I spend preparing for my class. This feeds into the issue of routines. When routines need to change to accommodate something like picture day, teachers think and plan how to keep those routines as close as possible to normal, so that everyone feels comfortable and is able to function. The routines do change, but they change as little as possible, because people work best when there are routines in place. So, while it's okay to bend routines to accommodate picture day, it's not okay to break them, and it's not okay to let a child decide to throw away the day's routines. School is not optional; it's what we do. And if you really want to teach your child that school is sometimes so upsetting that they have to plan to go home early, please, please don't enroll your child in my class. (Note: I'm not saying that school can't be upsetting; only that we shouldn't teach kids that we EXPECT it to be upsetting. That's setting them up for a bad attitude.)

I want to teach my girls that school is fun; that routines are important and should be respected as much as possible (I'm working on this at home;) that school is important enough not to miss unless there's no other choice; and that parents and teachers set the limits and make the decisions, not kids - that's something they'll be given increasing control over as they grow, but some things will remain non-negotiable because they are kids and I'm the parent. I want them to learn, also, that if they do miss school, catching up is important and is their responsibility, not the teacher's or mine. (That is, it's their responsibility to ask, to complete the work, and to hand it in.)

As with everything else about parenting, there are exceptions. If your child is asking to stay home, even though he used to enjoy school; if his eating or sleeping habits have changed; if his behaviour towards siblings or you has changed; if he's playing sick (the tummyache that disappears at five after nine, for example) when he never used to; all of these are signs that something at school is not right. Some investigation is in order, starting with talking to your child, then his teacher, and possibly a doctor. Possible culprits include bullying and childhood depression, or both.

Comments

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Oh, I can see an occasional break like that when things are getting too much. I find I need days like that periodically, too. But that's different, somehow - I think because it equates to a sick day in my mind.