Dear LPG readers,

I read with nostalgia what BJ had to say about the day that our hands-on grandparents’ duties come to an end (►►►), and although it was quite a few years ago for me now, I remember it with precisely the emotions that she writes about. It was her mention of the differences between her schooldays experienced as the student, the parent, and the grandparent which brought something else to mind.

 My youngest grandchild is now moving through the final stages of the educational process, while I have one so far past it that my great-grandchild is at the beginning of the journey.

I understand precisely where BJ is coming from when it comes to losing that contact as the young ones’ lives become so complicated that a grandparents’ involvement in it is more about watching from afar and keeping updated through what their parents, my children, have the time to tell me during the progressively brief telephone conversations, visits and chats that are possible during those family gatherings.

One aspect of school life has undergone significant changes, and although I'm not an expert on handling more challenging students, the ultimate punishment for wrongdoing has evolved.

Today’s teachers appear to be left with fewer ways than ever to deal with such issues. Nearly everything that they can do by way of discipline has relatively little effect on our children when compared with even the end of the last century. 

When I was at school in the 1950s, if a child did wrong, their parents would take more notice of what a teacher had to say before taking sides. Still, during my more recent times in the playground while picking up my youngest granddaughter from the same school that her mother attended, the different dynamic is more than evident. Now, during that last five minutes before the school gates open and the children are released, I can’t help but hear more conversations involving the injustices done to a child by their teacher and what the parent is going to do about it. At the same time, there is little talk about the ordeals many of the teachers are experiencing. 

I never aspired to be a teacher, but I have a very good friend who chose that path. Even though she retired a while ago, she now has some stories to tell about her time in the classroom. I also read a recent report which cannot help but worry anyone hoping to enter the profession. I found some statistics about the number of teachers who, on average, after 4 years of study, have started and left their teaching career within a quarter of that time. 

It is clear that, when we pensioners were young, and even when our children were, teachers might have had too much power. Still, you don’t have to be a teacher to get the feeling that many of our present generation schoolchildren have. Their parents have to take some of the responsibility for leaving the UK teachers that do stay in the system, little recourse but to use exclusion as the ultimate punishment. Things were harsher for our generation when we were in school, but just looking around, if you happen to be out when the children come home from school, tells its own story.

I can’t help but think that we grandparents have an advisory part to play, if they still ever listen to us, by influencing our children as best we can, to take all this information on board for the sake of their children and the teachers that teach them. So can I remind those pensioner-parents and grandparents who still have a negligible influence to drop the subject into the conversation from time to time… 

DS, Camberwell

DS shares a few related internet facts…

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