Interview Essay
Question: Do you feel yourself welcome in child’s classroom? How can you describe relations with child’s teacher?
Answer: I cannot say that I’m welcome in child’s classroom. You know, It’s more like business relations, when everyone has tied goals and tasks that should be completed and achieved. We have no warm feelings to each other and our communication never goes beyond the borders of business collaboration.
Question: Once your child started school, did you feel that teachers asked for your input on their education? If so, what did they do that made you feel your input was important?
Answer: Yes, I felt that my input was asked. However, these inputs were mostly related to standards and norms, such as help with child’s homework, participation in parents meetings etc. I suppose, I have never felt that my input is important or significant one. It’s all about parental responsibilities, not about some kind of outstanding achievements.
Question: How important do you think are parents with respect to their child’s education?
Answer: The parental respect to children’s education is proportional to their wish of children’s successful future. Thereby, yeh, it is really important.
Question: How do you think parents and teachers could work better together to enhance learning for children?
Answer: It pretty interesting question in fact. To my mind, the first issue here is proper discharge of own duties. Keeping the norms and standards keeping and following the rules is the key to benefit children.
Question: I see. Who takes the main role in child’s education and who affects his/her achievements – teacher or parents?
Answer: I suppose teacher. You see, normal parents always want the best to their kids. They will do everything to benefit them and no doubts raise about it. In his/her turn, teacher is not directly interested. It is just the person who works for money and there is no guarantee that the job is something more than money source to him/her. In addition, teacher is a person who is much more involved in child’s educational process, in comparison to parents, who are busy at their jobs and cannot find enough time to appropriate issue often.
Question: What is a good teacher in your opinion?
Answer: In my opinion, it is disciplined, well-skilled, ambitious, interested and well educated professional. I do not think that teaching experience is important here. To my mind, young and active specialists do their jobs even better as they are fresh, attentive to children and motivated to prove own professionalism.
Question: What about the relations with teacher? What are the perfect to you?
Answer: As I said, my current communication with child’s teacher do not go beyond the borders of business collaboration. I’m pretty satisfied with such approach, however, I cannot say that it is perfect. As for me, I would like to see some more individualism. My point is high professionalism in combination to individual approach to every student make teacher perfect to parents and benefit children most as the result. In this order, I would like to see some more interest in my child as the person. It would help me to notice some individual problems of my son.
Question: Do you think parents can help teachers with their professional activities?
Answer: I think yes, and it is all about child’s individuality still. By helping teacher to understand peculiar properties of my son, I would make teacher enabled to motivate my child to intensive learning. Unfortunately, the teacher of my son is not so interested in these issues, being not bad professional all the same.