TeachersTopic

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Parental Involvement and What Teachers Make, answers by Taylor Mali, author of What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World

Our TeachersCount blog topic for April was “Parental Involvement”; In terms of a student’s education, what do you feel the parent’s role should be?

Active engagement. Parents should know everything their children are studying in every subject. In fact, I'm a fan of looking over homework every night. I have a chapter in my book about making calls home to parents, which I used to do every Tuesday evening. I quickly discovered that calls home for "good" reasons—to compliment an improved quiz grade or maybe just an astute comment in class—were actually more effective than calls home for "bad" reasons. Furthermore, if you've already spoken to a parent about how wonderful his or her child is, you have them on your side when you need to call home in a month to tell them how lazy their child has become. Of course, the danger is that the parents will become "helicopter" parents, always hovering. But I think it's easier to pull back from that than it is to ask an absentee parent to suddenly start caring more. And lastly, if you do encounter apathy or disregard when trying to reach parents, well, that's important to know.

In the chapter, “Your Child is My Student” you mention that teachers are often called upon to fulfill the role of parents. Could you expand on this comment and discuss what some of the consequences of this may be.

We're seeing the consequences of it now with teachers being blamed for the unreadiness of children to learn. If children come to school hungry, sleep-deprived, and anxious, they are not in the right mindset to learn. So any lack of achievement or progress on their part really shouldn't be attributed to bad teaching. A recent study quoted by Linda Darling-Hammond (one of my heroines) reports that the public schools in the US with the lowest percentage of students below the poverty line outperform schools from all other countries in the world, even Finland and South Korea. We know what the problem is: poverty. It's not that other countries don't have better schools than we do, it's that other countries are less tolerant of poverty among children.

When discussing your poem “What Teachers Make” you say “the poem speaks to people, teachers and non-teachers alike.” What about the poem, do you think, has created such a strong impact?

"What Teachers Make" was written for use in poetry slams, competitive poetry readings judged by the audience, and it relies on my belief that the highest-scoring emotion in slam is self-righteous indignation ("How dare you judge me by the size of my paycheck!"), so to a certain extent the poem is just affecting the general public the same way it affects audiences and judges at poetry slams. I was a passionate teacher, and the incident with the lawyer that was the triggering subject of the poem really made me furious. So when I wrote the poem, I pulled out all the stops and just let the lawyer have it! Of course, the poem is in no way an accurate record of what I ACTUALLY said to the lawyer on the night of the party. I'm rewriting history to make myself seem smarter and more courageous. The poem is what I WISH I said. It's part revenge fantasy, and people like those.

In the chapter, “Teachers Who Made a Difference for Me”, you discuss three teachers who made a meaningful difference in your life. Is there a quality that all three of your teachers had in common? What do you think is one of the most important qualities that a teacher should possess?

The one quality they all had in common was love. Love for what they were teaching, certainly, but more importantly, love for WHO they were teaching. It matters not if your students like you. You need to LOVE them. Especially if they are not likable.