Advice from a teacher in the autumn of summer

Tuesday 8/4/26

Yesterday I saw where a teacher, who said she'd been teaching for a long time, remarked that it was that time of the year where she offered other teachers advice. Makes sense. It's still summer, but everyone is thinking about going back to school. It's the autumn of summer, you could say.

She conveyed this in a friendly manner, and you could take or leave her advice, but it was there if anyone had use for it. As I usually do, I thought, "Hmmm, maybe I can learn something here." If I can't, or what's being said isn't relevant for me, I'm at least exposed to another viewpoint.

She said that you, as a teacher, will receive angry emails from parents. Sometimes a number from the same parent. Her advice was to never respond to what they're saying in email. Don't put it in writing. She shared the simple thing she sent to all these parents. It read something like, "I'm more than happy to talk about [name of your kid] and am available at the school to talk by phone at such and such a time."

Then she added that hardly any of these parents have ever phoned her. Because then it's person to person. It isn't going off in this non-person to person manner.

This is also true in my experience. People aren't brave. This journal is seen by most as what would be a person to person thing. It's not a phone call, it's not standing face to face, but if someone wanted to go off, it still has that mind versus mind quality to it. There's the real chance your words would appear for people to see next to my words back to you or about you.

I said above that people aren't brave, but usually they're cowards in the extreme. They're arrogant, but when it comes down to it, they're also are very insecure. They doubt themselves in the extreme as well, when it really counts. Sometimes that's just when they know that other people will see and hear them in action, or even just one person, like in the case of this teacher.

Perhaps one thinks about those parents parenting, too. We have a parenting problem in this world. I'd maintain that many of this world's problems could be addressed with better parenting. Parents are in charge of helping young people be good people and smarter people. But basically no one among those parents tries to be a better or smarter person themselves. It wouldn't occur to them to.

And now they're in charge of ministering to impressionable minds and hearts on these scores? Instructing them? Guiding them?

Adults don't read and they can't understand what they read, no matter how simple it is, in the instances when they "have" to read, and I'll put social media and internet scrolling in that category, because people live as if that's something they have to do.

But you know what is one of the most problematic reading demographics? The one to finish reading off forever? Or to stop it from having a chance to assert itself as this things we should and must do, that can benefit us like nothing else? The danger demo, in other words?

It's little children. I am certain that children read and are read to less than they have been in a long time. You can't say always, because there was a time not too, too long ago, when the only book in a home in these parts would have been a religious text. The Pilgrims didn't have lots of books to pick from for bedtime readings.

To date, people who are readers were almost always readers from the earliest time that they could read. Before that, they were read to. If someone at forty reads, chances are they read at seven, often voraciously. The forty-year-old who didn't read at seven, and hasn't read along the way, is extremely unlikely to ever pick up reading.

I'm using the qualifiers I do because the truth is that if I'm to do what I'm trying to do, I'd need to get people reading my work who weren't readers, and people who never intended to be readers, and I don't want to 100% say--even to myself right now--that I'm screwed, because I need to try today, and tomorrow. You can call this semantics and that's fine, or a technique I'm using to "trick" myself in order to keep remaining here a while longer, and like I said a few days ago, I'm not going to argue the point. But I'm also not ready to say that's what I am doing. Maybe I'm unsure myself. But I do know what I'd have to do, and who would have to be reading my work, and reading regularly, looking forward to it, having it be a big part of their lives, for me to do what I'm trying to do.

The same parent who goes off in an email to a teacher they can't even face on the phone, is the same parent who never read to her child, doesn't care if her child reads, sees her child staring into a screen every time she walks past her in the home, but thinks all is well and super duper because her child is handed good marks in her school work.

School is like grading on one absurd curve now, because the children are less capable than in times past. What gets the highest of marks in 2026 wouldn't have produced the same mark in, say, 1989. The parent won't be interested in the reality. They'll typically be interested in the bottom line only. Those grades, that there are no reported problems.

They're not vetting the child's academic development. They're less interested in what they're learning, how well they're learning and applying it, and how they're progressing. It's rubber stamping something without seeing what's in the document. But so long as the parent sees that rubber stamp, that's all they care about. That's how many parents parent. And I should think that's all parents who send angry emails to a teachers but then never make the call or suggest an in-person meeting.