My first teaching job was at a prestigious boys’ boarding school. A colleague who had the next desk in the staff room was also head of the first-formers’ boarding house, which meant he received an awful lot of emails from anxious parents about their not-quite-so-anxious sons. He left all these emails unread for a fortnight, because after this time the issues (or non-issues) had usually resolved themselves.

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barrenko 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I am cross-quoting from N.N. Taleb, forgive my errors, but to me it's something in the line of "If you want to be cured from reading the newspaper, spend a week reading old newspaper."

	▲	indigoabstract 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's amusing. I remember there is this site where you can read 40 year old "news", as discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017175 But I couldn't say how many people it cured of reading the news so far.

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rvba 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Please help, my son is bullied"

After two weeks: it solved itself, he committed suicide.

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cjs_ac 2 days ago | parent [-]

Housemasters and housemistresses have a better idea of whether pupils are being bullied than parents, because they are physically present and receive reports from classroom teachers, tutors, games coaches, and so on. The 1970s are over and boarding schools are no longer run by rum, sodomy and the lash.

The refusal of many twenty-first century parents to acknowledge that schoolteachers have at least two university degrees and consequently have expertise in their profession is the cause of the issue. If you’re not willing to trust the professional educators and administrative processes at a school, why are you spending the median income on sending your child there?

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sokoloff 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

It can be simultaneously true that 5% of educators are great, 20% very good, 60% are good, 13% are adequate, and 2% should have fired 5 years or more ago.

If you’re in the first three groups, it can be hard to understand the disrespect and vitriol which is overwhelmingly directed at experiences parents have with that last group.

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cjs_ac 2 days ago | parent [-]

Prestigious boarding schools - the schools that I’ve been writing about - need not bother with teachers outside that top 25%.

Non-selective government schools, like all public services, have inevitably become largely concerned with social work; teachers in those schools, regardless of their ability, have to respond to parents immediately.

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sokoloff 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> teachers in those schools, regardless of their ability, have to respond to parents immediately.

Or else what? Their union will hold them to account? Their colleagues? Their administration?

I have two kids in such public schools and I can’t think of anything I’d ask of a teacher that would require a same-day response let alone an immediate one.

If I need an immediate response, it’s not likely a topic I should be taking to a teacher in the first place. Their job is to teach, not to monitor for inbound comms from parents.

	▲	cjs_ac 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		By 'immediate', I meant same day. But you sound like a reasonable parent; you're writing in the hypothetical. It's the small minority of parents who are constantly in contact with teachers (because most legitimate concerns should be triaged by the school receptionist) and consequently cause the problems - it's no different to any other customer-facing role.

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waterhouse 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> need not bother with teachers outside that top 25%.

To simply "not bother" with lower-quality teachers sounds like you find it easy, as an institution, to determine teachers' quality. That seems far from a solved problem, for teachers and indeed most employees in general. You can pick a particular metric, of course, but then people will try to game it, and in teaching, there seems to be a lot of room for gaming metrics...

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rvba 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes nothing bad has never happened in a prestigious boarding school, just because they charge more money, especially to kids of rich people.

After all rich people and their rich kids never do anything wrong /s

	▲	cjs_ac 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I’m talking about institutions and their internal processes, not some tedious nonsense about how money is intrinsically evil. Rich people have all sorts of problems. Part of the package in an elite education is that the school has a better capacity to sort those out by itself. Constant communication with parents undermines that. It’s a question of values and understanding what you’re buying into. These schools don’t suit all parenting styles.

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chrisjj 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> schoolteachers have at least two university degrees and consequently have expertise in their profession

Utter fallacy. Expertise in teaching requires training, experience and/or natural talent.

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paddleon a day ago | parent | next [-]

I'm curious what you consider "training", and how this would be different than a vocation-specific university degree? Which typically also includes supervised real-world teaching experience?

	▲	rvba 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"Typically" does a lot of heavy lifting here

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cjs_ac 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm intrigued as to what you think one studies as part of a Postgraduate Certificate in Education or a Masters in Education.

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madaxe_again 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Ah, for days of yore, when if the parents wanted to talk to the school, they could… write a letter.

Honestly, I see no small part of the problem here as being that communication is too easy, and it results in a lot of frivolity. Used to be that you had a problem, you figured it out - now you can send an angry WhatsApp message, and because some person hasn’t responded to you within 20 seconds, they are now your problem, and any initiative to figure it out yourself has flown the coop.