Our local high school held its invitational tournament for Speech and Debate yesterday. The tournament has been growing yearly. I believe this is largely due to the efforts of the director. Our son participated in Speech and Debate for all four years of high school. We believed that this was good preparation for later in life. Good public speaking skills are essential in many jobs. The ability to write well, needed to prepare a speech, is also a necessity. My wife and I have participated by judging and by preparing the food for breakfast and lunch for the judges and volunteers.
During our years of participation, we have noticed a general lack of parental participation. This is more notable when I compare notes with friends who have kids in the athletic programs at the same schools. Participation by parents, especially the fathers, is close to 100% for games and dinners to support the athletes.** For speech and debate, there is a small, dedicated group of parents who participate, but nowhere even close to 100%. This group is dominated by mothers.
When one reads a recent piece by Dreher supporting the idea that our problems with education are somehow the fault of Boomers, or teachers, or Boomer teachers, I cannot help but remember what I see very year. The parents I see, or rather not see, are in their 30s and 40s. Definitely not Boomers. What I do see is a lot of teachers putting in extra time on weekdays and whole days on weekends, including a lot of travel, to support these kids in what I believe to be a very beneficial endeavor. In the ongoing discussion about the issues with our educational system, I think we need to look at problems with our students, teachers and parents. However, I still think that issues on the parental side are the most overlooked. Perhaps because they are the most difficult to fix, or maybe because they do most of the voting.
**This is not intended to denigrate athletics. Useful skills can come from athletic participation. I am looking more at parental involvement in school related activities.
I second, third, and fourth you on this. While one can point to issues with teachers, schools, districts, bureaucrats, etc., a lot of it ultimately comes down to the fact that parents either support their kids’ education, or all to often, don’t. Children spend more time with family than at school, and many studies suggest that home environment is the biggest variable in predicting success (or lack thereof) in school. Of course, this is the factor that never gets talked about, and the one which is the least tractable.
Children do not necessarily spend more time with family than in school–they undoubtedly spend more time out of school than in, but that’s a whole other set of stats. Children probably spend more of their waking hours in school than at home, and more of their consciously attentive time with peers than in school OR at home.
My experience being involved in schools varies. Some teachers are much more welcoming than others. In general I find schools rather picky about parental involvement. As long as you’re 100% supportive and don’t question or challenge their authority, they love you, otherwise forget about it.
Even in sports I found a dichotomy. In high school, the football coaches set clear guidelines for parents as far as playing time went and welcomed parents to watch practices, help with tailgates, fundraisers, etc. The head coach is pretty much a great guy and everybody likes him. In girls’ basketball, my daughter’s sport, things are quite different. The coaches seem to view parents as the enemy, don’t want them at practice, limit when and what a parent can complain about, and generally take an adversarial position with parents.
Guess who has the most successful program. Hint: the ball isn’t round.
As for speeches, I’ve found that a key to a successful speech is flattering the group you’re trying to impress.
Posts like this are why I wish we had a “Like” button. I want you to know I read your post (for some reason that is important to me) but I don’t really have any current perspective on this since I don’t have kids and the friends I have with kids are all in early grade school.
But as long as I’m here…
My parents didn’t actively support any of my many extracurricular activities. They supported me doing them (helped with transportation, making costumes or other supplies as necessary); they just were very busy and also figured it was my thing. Were they supposed to spend every day going to booster club meetings for the various activities of three kids? That’s crazy. I was in the small speech & debate program which our teacher organized better than it had been and started to make more competitive with the larger K.C. schools. I don’t think it was parents he used as judges – I think he rallied support from local professionals, lawyers, etc. (I’m not saying parental-involvement is bad; just that I seemed to get on fine without it).
That teacher then became the drama teacher and hugely expanded the program starting with basically no budget from the district and creating a huge savings account through ad sales in the program (we students went out and got the ads; this was also an excellent place for parent-involvement). He was very good at finding the balance of parent-help. He harnessed the energy of the interested parents but kept them at arms’ length – no open rehearsals for example. Sometimes it takes a gay guy to charm the moms (of course we didn’t know that in MO in the early 90s but looking back it seems ridiculous we ever believed the story about his long-time girlfriend who showed up occasionally).
Well, apparently I did have 2 cents.