One of the greatest wears on a teacher’s mental health is the frequent interference of parents in the educational system. In her second chapter, Froehlich discusses this issue only in passing – during her evaluation of why teaching is considered only a second-tier profession within the scale of typical occupations for the highly educated.
Doctors and lawyers are Froehlich’s primary examples of professionals who are usually consulted “when things go wrong” and a direct injury is done to a person. They are taught to be approachable, as it is the only way that they can actively win clients – but there follows an air of mystique wherever they go. Most laypeople assume that these men and women must be unbelievably brilliant to have endured so many years of Med school, and surely competent enough to have passed the dreaded Bar exam.
Teachers, meanwhile, are in constant contact with students on days both good and bad, successful and unsuccessful. They stand as active witnesses to the way children grow and change from minute to minute – whether they like it or not! Teachers may be just as (over)educated as any doctor or lawyer … but the veneer of wise authority is removed by the small, daily social interactions that reveal us as human.
Therefore, teachers are occasionally seen as something of a challenge to a parent’s honor – we fulfill a great deal of their own roles (albeit in a slightly less nurturing way) and often spend more time with the students than their own official guardians do. Parents quickly become protective of their children, but more importantly, defensive when their ideas about how to raise, discipline, encourage, or direct said children are questioned. Specifically, Froehlich notes that parents looking to change the practices of the Chicago school system (especially “parents of higher socioeconomic status”) could actually gain remarkable levels of power, fighting against what they found objectionable in the teachers’ work to the point where their “control even reached into curriculum issues, a domain usually believed to be controlled by the experts – the teaching staff” (33).
I feel that the teaching profession cannot avoid this issue of “chronic critique” merely because academic schedules forbid it to do so. Teachers usually spend 180 of the 365 days a year in their public school classrooms. Other highly-educated professionals manage to insulate themselves from this pressure by charging a shockingly high hourly wage for their services! Only on the day that the teaching profession reaches this standard of financial desirability can we avoid parental conflict. Until then, we can only console ourselves with things like the audio clip I will include here!
My mother sent me this mp3 in an email a few months ago. It claims to be the recorded message on an answering machine for an elite private school in Australia. Whether or not that is true matters little – at the end of the day, this is what every school system would like to say to the parents of its students! Enjoy.
