WHAT KIND OF PARENT DO YOU THINK YOU WILL BE? Why? What responsibilities do you face? What responsibilities do you think your parents face?

Prompt for the 11/15/06 WAVE Journal Entries

Since I parent students all day long, I am not sure how I would react with children at home as well. Deaaling with students asking the same questions, five times a day, with over 250 students going through my room during one school year -- not sure if the patience needed to tend to my own children would last after days spent teaching. Some days are better than others - and I leave with a sense of wonderment at seeing the world through a child's eyes, while other times I leave just wanting to go and live like a hermit in the mountains where I don't have to answer one more question ever again.

My parents' faced the responsibilities for two kids who were very easy to deal with. No big problems, we both liked school, enjoyed being involved but not too much, both liked doing things together as a family. Parents today with separate familes and sometimes both parents working and children scheduled to the max, often means that I as a teacher am spending more time with some people's children than they are. That is a tough balance -- kids need time to talk with their parents or in the case of adolescents, sometimes NOT talk with their parents. They are listening, they just don't necessarily like to show it.