Parental engagement

Parental engagement in schools is something I never really thought about before this week's readings and class. When I was in school my parents were very engaged and did their best to attend any kind of school event my sisters or I may have been involved in. It wasn't always easy for my parents to make it to everything. They are divorced. My mom worked during the day and my dad worked at night. Two sisters and I are a year apart, so there was always some kind of overlapped. But we knew that our parents cared about our education and what/how we were doing in school. I guess it is naive, but when I was in school I never really thought about what it would be like to have parents who were not actively engaged in the school community for whatever reason.

In the article Finding Ways In: Community-Based Perspectives on Southeast Asian Family Involvment with School in  a New England State Collingnon notes that "for members of the Southeast Asian communities,  family involvement with school is a new concept" (p.32). This provides an extra challenge for us as educators. There is already a possibilty that language will hinder our attempts to communicate with some of our students' parents/guardians. Then there is the fact that it may part of their culture not to be involved in the school community. So how do you get these parents to come to events or volunteer to help in class. This does not mean that the parents don't care about their kids, they just don't know that this is how American schools work. That here parents are encouraged to participate.

The readings and the panels  from this week really made me understand how important it is for us a teachers to do everything we can to reach out to parents and encourage them to come to events. Just as I think it is important for teachers to make appearances at events that students patrticipate in, it is equally, if not more, important that parents or any family member is there as well. The encouragement and confidence that students get from seeing family members in the crowd or in their classroom is immeaasurable and can do wonder for students.

Sexuality Education and Desire: Still Missing after All These Years

I found reading about the abstinence only until marriage (AOUM) education very interesting. It made me think about the two health classes I can remember taking. The first was in sixth grade and it was part of the FACS (which I think stood for family and consumer sciences) classes. There we were taught mainly about abstinence as a form of birth control. We were all about eleven years old, and I think that kind of message was appropriate for students of our age. I think most people can agree that eleven is still pretty young for kids to be thinking about having sex. Looking back at that health class I feel like we were properly informed about sex education for our age.

The second time I had a health class was as a freshman in high school. There the program was different. abstinence was not the only form of birth control that we were taught about. In this class we learned about a wide array of birth control options along with abstinence. I think my high school clearly understood that they were not going to be sucessful in stopping all of its students from having sex. We had a couple teenage pregancies a year at my school. Clearly not all of the students there were taking chasity vows. So in our health classes my fellow students and I received what I preceive to be a pretty comprehensive sexual education. Because of this, I was semi-surprised to read this article and to see that most schools do not seem to do the same as my high school did. I guess I was a bit naive in my thinking.

I guess some people would look at the pregnancy rate at my high school and say that the comprehensive education isn't working and that the students need to be taught along the AOUM lines. I would disagree with that. I think there is a time and a place for that kind of sexual education. I think it was fitting in my middle school class. As for high schools I think educators need to understand what teenagers are going through bioloically at that age. I think we need to realize that teenagers today are not all going to successfully remain abstinant until marriage. We should be providing them with a comprehensive education, not only about what they are biologically experiencing, but also all the ways that they can prevent an unwanted pregnancy.