Please follow me - Being a First Grade Parent: Being a First Grade Parent

Author: Xue Ruiping
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-07-01
Features: American teachers who are excellent at their jobs have children report to them at work: "Yao Jianqiang hit ××× and made them cry." I said, "I know, I'll criticize Yao Jianqiang later." Teacher Yan was surprised: "Yao Jianqiang is in your class?" "Yes, the other one should be in your class." "You remember their names?" "I know they're from my class just by their names. It'll take a few days to match them with people. But quite a few can already be matched." "You're really good." In the morning, there were three classes. During the second class, which was Chinese, I was checking if the students' a, o, and e were written correctly, when Zhu Xiangyu threw up. The chairs and the area outside the classroom were covered in it. While cleaning up and sweeping, I called the parents of the sick children and told them to come over. Just as I hung up the phone, the bell rang again—the third class was my moral education class, and I ran to the classroom. At the beginning, a man in black stood at the door, which was strange. I asked who he was looking for, and he said, "You!" His tone was very rude. I smiled and bowed—because I had been nodding, shaking my head, and bowing to avoid speaking these past two days—"Sorry, you'll have to wait until class is over. You can't do that!" I firmly closed the door. He stood outside for a while and then disappeared. I didn't care. After class, he was gone, and he didn't come back in the afternoon. I didn't know what happened or who his father was. I didn't ask, nor did I want to know. Maybe he saw that I was sweating in such a cool day and felt pity for me. So what? Before morning dismissal, I wrote on the books of the non-fee-paying students the afternoon's required tuition fee. Before afternoon class, I collected the money. Before dismissal, I urgently announced that the education bureau would check the health and vaccination certificates the next day. First-grade kids, how can you explain things to them? Like putting out a fire, I printed out the notice and cut it into small strips. When I rushed to the classroom door to distribute them, a few kids had already run out of the school faster than I did! [This passage describes how I introduced a doctoral dissertation to recreate the overloaded state of homeroom teachers in primary and secondary schools. "With great power comes great responsibility," and the role of homeroom teachers in teaching management is debatable regarding its rationality and humanity.] Xiao'an asked, "After three days, have you found any particularly annoying kids in your class?" I said, "Of course!" "Which ones?" Suddenly, I realized, "I shouldn't say anything bad about the students. Actually, I should reflect on myself—I shouldn't have said there were annoying kids." She laughed. I thought, "Not only that, I also have to avoid saying anything bad about the parents." In America, the requirements for excellent teachers are: quickly remember the students' names; have a sense of humor; don't say bad things about students; and don't have overly close relationships with students.