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I need more paperwork!

I’m fibbing a bit here; I hate paperwork.  I despise it, in fact.  However, I love feedback from people (and while I prefer email) I really enjoyed getting weekly updates from my daughter’s teacher on her progress at school.

I came accross this story linked from “The Times Online”

Times have changed so much since many parents were at school, that teaching methods are often now completely different. This report says that parents feel that schools “expect” them to support their children’s learning, and assume they know how to do so.

I sometimes had to scratch my head over some of the more baroque teaching methods employed by my Daugther’s instructors; they had warned us to expect the unexpected, but how does one prepare for the utterly alien?  I wish I had kept some of the pages on hand to demonstrate the malefic wonder of it all; the square diagrams of numbers that seemed utterly foreign to me.  Not to mention my wife; who would often look at the homework sheet, sniff a bit then pass it off to me in hopes that I could make heads or tales of it.

This situation improved slightly when we were presented with an actual copy of the source materials that gave examples of the expected product of our daemonic equations.  Sometimes we could even check over her work to ensure that it was correct.  As the days progressed and the teaching methods solidified, so did our Daughter’s understanding of the work and therefore it fell to us to simply ensure that it was correct and complete.  My codex Malefectorum being of the old-school; sometimes I wondered if I was not getting the answers right myself; or at least; not “new school” right.

Food for thought.

Published inCommentaryCurrent Events