Each of us, individually and as families, is faced everyday with choices as to how we spend the precious minutes of each day. There is always the same amount everyday, 1440 of them. So how do we choose to use them? I often view time like a budget. It is a fixed thing, never seems to be enough and I want to spend it wisely.
It is easy then to place a value on those minutes, and then as individuals and families we choose to spend them on the activities that we value or need. We need sleep, we need time together, and in most our cases, we need to go to school and work.
I am not here to judge anyone’s value system or to say that how I choose to value my decisions are better than anyone else. But a discussion I heard this week made me think about it more than usual.
With Halloween falling on a Thursday, many of my students asked if there was school on Friday. “Of course!” I answered. Many were surprised. In follow up conversations with parents, many informed me that their child would not be at school on Friday because they were worried that their child would be to amped up on sugar, or that they planned to stay up late and watch movies.
So the question, by not placing school high enough in the value list (at least my value list) are parents undermining the importance of school? Or, am I just secretly judging the parents because I am such an advocate of having children in school as much as possible? I do understand that there are times when a student can’t be at school due to illness or family emergencies, but what about those times when a child is not at school because it just doesn’t fit in?
I feel that we do an excellent job of providing interventions for students that are a little behind in the different academic area. One of the requirements of determining if the intervention is successful or not is how well the student attended the intervention. If a student is behind, and then is absent and missing the intervention, we cannot then provide additional help because we can’t show that the intervention worked.
So let’s have an agreement. Help get your child to school on time as much as possible, and I will do my best to determine your child’s academic needs and try and meet them.