Hector’s Parents Prepared Him for First Day at School

The kid’s name was Hector and even though I only observed him for a few hours two years ago, he’s stuck in my mind. It was the first day of the 1991-92 school year at Killybrooke Elementary School in Costa Mesa, and I thought it’d be fun to watch first-graders go through their paces.

What I remember about little Hector was his precision. He raised his hand before speaking. When teacher Shirley La Croix asked him to distribute papers, he did so quietly and efficiently. When she asked the kids to write sentences on paper, Hector’s penmanship was flawless and the letters never strayed from the line.

I remember thinking, Here’s a kid whose parents prepared him for school .

With another school year about to begin, it got me thinking what teachers’ wish lists would be for parents. In other words, if teachers could snap their fingers and make parents do just one thing with their youngsters to get them ready for school, what would it be.

“Read to your child every day,” said Jill Primrose, a first-grade teacher at Beswick Elementary School in Tustin. “Take 10 minutes a day to read one storybook to your child. It would expose them to print, to stories. They need to understand that they read books to get meaning. There’s a message in a book. . . . Children won’t read unless they see other people reading. They need models. If you don’t see people reading and you’re not encouraged to read, reading is a big mystery, whereas if you’re exposed to it, it’s a natural thing, it’s not a weird thing to read.”

Shirley La Croix, who still teaches at Killybrooke, remembers Hector. She said he was a fine student, because “he knew how to follow directions and tune in. I think in first grade, that is probably the most important thing. We find a lot of kids who can’t or don’t follow directions, because they’ve never been taught.”

Her wish for parents, she said, is that their youngsters come to school “ready to listen and follow directions.”

Linda Schleiger teaches first-graders at Anaheim Hills Elementary School. She’s even willing to tackle the youngsters’ bouts with inattentiveness, if parents would just guarantee their children’s respect for authority. “In many cases, it’s just social kinds of things,” she said. “Just interacting at an appropriate social level and emotional development.”

Schleiger isn’t talking about pie-in-the-sky perfection--just the basics, such as respect for authority, common courtesy and understanding and empathy for others.

All three teachers made a point of saying they appreciate the pressures on families, some of which are single-parent situations or where both parents work. As such, they said, time is tight.

“I would say the most important thing is just spend time with your child and be interested in school,” Primrose said. Ask them at home what they learned that day or about their favorite part of school, she said.

La Croix made the same point and said it can be done around the dinner table. In addition to keeping the parent informed, it forces the child to communicate what he or she did at school and gets them out of the all-too-common mode of sitting silently in front of the television set.

Schleiger said she tries to sell parents on the teamwork aspect of education, with parents and students working with teachers. Parents should instill a sense in the child that “they’re not out there all by themselves” when it comes to homework or learning, Schleiger said.

None of this stuff is earth-shaking. To me, that’s what makes it interesting. That is, teachers aren’t asking that parents teach. The teachers are more than willing to do that. All they’re asking is that parents give them a leg up by sending their children to school with basic social and behavioral skills and by stoking their interest in learning.

For me, the bottom line is that it would be easier to judge what kind of job the schools are doing if we could first guarantee that all parents are handling their end of the bargain.

Let me give you the sad news that all parents are not.

I go back to my memory of Hector. Because for every kid like him who wrote his letters and numbers neatly and listened to the teacher, there was another student who scribbled as if he’d never put pencil to paper and had never been asked to listen to directions in his life.

As Linda Schleiger says, it’s all about teamwork, folks.