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CYNTHIA ARMSTRONG

The Similarities Between Public Schools And Parenting

By Cynthia Armstrong

I'm going to talk about the similarities between school and parenting, teaching and parenting. It is sometimes that I learn something that is apparent and then I'm able to apply it in my classroom. Sometimes there are things that I noticed in school that I go to. How does that work in parenting? I want to talk about one of those instances where I learned something at school.This time I had an experience that really got me thinking and remembering when I first understood something as a teacher and was able to apply it as a parent and in schools, I will just put that statement out there.

I am an American public school teacher. My son-in-law is from Italy and sometimes I see him roll his eyes or give a little look about what happens in school in America. I am not sure what's out there in the rest of the world but here in America, we do not teach children to learn. We really don't. In the public education setting, that's not part of what we teach, individual teachers might do it but as an educational society, that's not something we really teach children. We get children who struggle to make mistakes. They want to know the answers like, what do I do now? What do I say now? How do I do that? And they really hesitate. They don't understand learning like what it is to learn and how awesome mistakes are and how they have all the answers they need. If they let go of uncertainty, then their brain works for them and helps them be creative in figuring out answers and in learning to learn, not just learning to get the right answer. And as parents, that's what I noticed like how much of this comes from so many years in education as a student, and as a child?

We start sometimes in preschool, sometimes in kindergarten. And we can go through high school or in college, and there's a lot of that same feeling. What's the right answer? As kids get older, it's like you don't teach them all that stuff. Just tell them what they need for the test and they're not learning to learn, and that there's a challenge to overcome in parenting and in all parts of our life. I mean take a look, is that something that has carried over and I figure out parents have been through this type of public education.

It's just something to consider and I'm really interested so please give feedback, give your thoughts below. Is this just me thinking? Not necessarily knowing 100% for sure, but it's something I'm pretty sure of in what I'm seeing here. Without talking with parents and with children, I seem quite a bit off. But as a parent now, when I look at parents, the resources for parents of the parenting advice out there, the parenting courses you can take, there are a lot of questions like “What do I say in this situation?? This is what's going on with my child. How do I fix it? What is it that I need to say? How do I get the right answer? Give me the right answer? What's the right answer in this situation for my child?” That's what I see in public school education.

Is it just like what I have said, not necessarily the education system but just the feeling we had or are they really connected? But as a parent when I noticed that as a teacher, I wanted the right answers. I want to know exactly what I need to say. How do I correct this? How do I make this happen the way I want it to with my children? And that's when I started looking at it. Now, as a teacher, I am grateful that I kind of got into the earlier years because there's things that are taught.

Not specifically, but things that children need to learn and understand in order to do academic learning that are foundational skills that are not academic, that allow them to learn academically that if I was in older grade I might not have noticed right away, maybe, but I might not have. And so I was able to then look at that blood parenting. Is that foundational understanding that we need? And yes, a universal thing. Would we go all the way down to that foundation? It's a universal understanding. So it applies to all things that apply to parenting. It applies to school. That applies to my relationship with my spouse and to my relationship with friends. It applies to how I do my work.

It's a foundational thing that applies to more areas, those foundational things that we teach toddlers, preschoolers, and kindergarten. Kindergarteners that allow them to learn academically also help them to show up for family chores, for church services or whenever religious services are there for all aspects of their life. And so that’s kind of what's different in the courses that I teach in and the things that I do when I teach parents, it's really difficult to do that and just these like little social media things but in my courses I really go into what is that foundational.

Understanding of how we make sense of things, how we learn things, how we use what we've learned and apply it to other situations. All these foundational learning is what we have and what we build all other learning on. So if there was something that we learned before, we could think about that kind of what solidified in us. It isn't necessarily true or correct. And then we build on that. It can create all kinds of struggles and difficulties that don't need to be there. They need to be there so that we can see where those difficulties are coming from, so we can change them into an essential part. But once we learn those difficulties, those challenges disappear because that's how we are alert. That's how we grow. That's how we notice what it is that we want to change, to get to where we want to go. So remember, children are great by their very natures, even our most challenging child. They are great by their very nature, and we have that. Privilege and that responsibility to teach them.