Collaboration (prompt 5)

As teachers, we will find ourselves not only dealing with the students in our classroom but the parents of the students as well. I know in my future teaching experience, I will be dealing with friendly parents who are easy to work with, and parents that may be a little bit harder to deal with. I have seen the teacher of my kindergarten class deal with a concerned parent before who had trouble understanding the teacher was having with this child. The problem was that the little girl, (Jane), has trouble paying attention and sitting still in class. The other students will sometimes be her “buddy” for the day to help her focus during class, but this doesn’t always work out and the Jane will get frustrated with her “buddy”. In this case she did have a problem with another child in the classroom one day and proceeded to bite the other child. Then the child who was bit decided to bite Jane back. There was skin broken in both cases and the first child was dealt with by the principle after the children were sent to the nurse. The next day, the parent of Jane called the teacher during class to discuss what had happened. From what I heard on the teacher’s end of the conversation was that the parent of Jane was having trouble understanding what had happened and that Jane sometimes has trouble focusing and interacting with the other children. The parent also didn’t understand that she needed to take Jane to a real doctor to get the bite checked out for any infections. She said that she couldn’t afford to take Jane to the doctor because she wasn’t covered under insurance. The teacher just tried to explain the situation as best she could and stress the fact that she needed to get Jane to a doctor and that there were free clinics in the area the parent could take Jane to. In this situation, I think the teacher handled the situation the best she could. I don’t know if the biting could have been prevented but the teacher handled the after effects of the situation pretty well in explaining it to the parent. She kept the parent well informed and was looking out for the welfare of Jane in stressing the trip to see a doctor about the bite. This situation can relate to the article “The Silenced Dialogue” by Lisa Delpit. In this article, Delpit discusses the “culture of power” and how the parents may not fall under that culture of power. This is a different form of the culture of power because the parent didn’t understand that the child needed to be taken care of. This parent thought of it as “the school’s job” to take care of the child. Delpit stresses that this doesn’t make the parent a “bad parent” but it just means that the parent didn’t understand certain codes and rules. This isn’t asking the parent to necessarily change the way her child is treated because as Delpit says, that would be “cultural genocide” but to understand that she needed to get Jane help. I think this teacher also stepped outside of the culture of power because she understood the parent couldn’t afford to take the child to a doctor so she was going to give her a list of free clinics that she could take Jane to. This collaboration is absolutely necessary when a teacher is dealing with parents.