Yep, same here. Mine also did a couple of "independent" projects, which were all done at home and were basically busywork,

Okay, I won't complain any more, especially since it is waaayyyy off topic, sorry.

Uh yeah, sorry to be so far off topic....how did that happen anyway?

Meh. That happens in an active conversation sometimes. <shrug> Personally, I think as long as we answer the original question and respect the original poster if s/he wants to haul us back on topic, it's okay to meander a bit. Sometimes really good stuff comes out of tangents, and I would hate to lose that by staying strictly on topic.

That's just my opinion though...Worth what you paid for it!

I didn't mean to make anyone feel guilty on the volunteering front. My DS's school is underfunded and has a lower-middle/lower class population. The school hardly has any volunteers and they fawn over anyone who is literate and less needy than the children. LOL. I have only one child and I work only 3 days a week. My situation makes volunteering very easy and very rewarding. My mother tried to volunteer at my school when I was a kid and she was never allowed to. It was against school policy.

One of the strengths of this board is that different people with different experiences post their stories. I hope that the result in a good resource for people who are needing to make decisions. I would feel bad, though, if I made anyone feel guilty for something that cannot be helped. That is never my intent!

Nah. No guilt.

I just think that it's too simple to approach it from the standpoint that schools respond better to advocacy if parents volunteer. As in all things, that works in some schools, and it doesn't in others. Our school happens to be overwhelmed with volunteers. I was only allowed in the classroom twice a month because so many parents were volunteering and the teacher had such limited hours when she accepted help. The jobs she assigned involved keeping the parents out of the classroom as much as possible. (And that's how it was for other parents, too, not just me. I checked with friends. It seems this particular teacher *really* disliked parental involvement!)

Ya' know, one of the things this forum has taught me is that above all else, stuff varies. Depending on the child, depending on the situation, depending on the school, depending on the teacher...There are simply no hard and fast rules.

(Of course, that's a hard and fast rule, right? )

Anyway, no guilt.

WEll, that's the one thing that I found so shocking when my son entered school after talking to friends all over the country.....schools are all soooo different, sometimes even within a school district!!!!

Nope, no guilt....just wanted to present the other side a) some schools don't allow parents in and b) some parents aren't able to do it.

Got my money's worth...

JB

Of course. I should have checked there first! But after posting here and on PAGE I got a few people personally recommending someone in my area, so that was good.

JB

Do you think some of them would want to volunteer our our school?!? We could sure use some. I think that the elementary PTA actually had to fold this year because there were no parents involved.



I did a ton of photocopying and running errands. One year my right arm got visibly larger because of all the hours I spent using the dye-cut machine! Still, for me that meant that the teacher was getting to teach instead of doing all this annoying stuff. And, in the case of dye-cutting, it meant that the teacher had material on hand to do some crafts if she ever ended up with 15 minutes to do them in. So I wasn't always in the classroom either. But it did allow me to be part of the community of the school. But I can see in a school where parents are knocking down the doors to volunteer, I still would have been just one of a crowd.

I certainly had no heartburn about doing some "busy work" out of the classroom--better me doing it than the teacher, certainly!

But my point was that she seemed to choose the work she did in order to keep parents out of the room. (And I'm not just paranoid. It was one of the big complaints that other parents had about her, too. She was unusual in the amount of time her volunteers spent out of the classroom.)

In fact, the only time that parents spent with the kids at all was during library time...when she wasn't there! I honestly think she just *really* hated to have people see her working.

She's just one case, and a bad enough case that it drove us out of the schools at that. But it was my experience, FWIW.