Career Day in NYC Public School & Detrimental Advice

Career Day at P.S. 161
Career Day at P.S. 161

Today Michael and I were honored to be invited to participate in P.S. 161’s Career Day.  It brought back old memories from my student teaching days.  And it has me wondering why some of us parents give our children such detrimental advice.

First of all, it was a challenge to accept the invitation, because we have Olivia, our 18 month old with us at home everyday.  Finding care, once in a while as opposed to having a baby sitter on a daily basis can be difficult.  Most of the babysitters we know have sucked their teeth and lost their patience with us for the last time because of our off and on need of their services.  They want more permanent work and we get that.

Sometimes we’d just like to have dinner and see a movie, but finding good babysitting is rarely easy. We ought to know, we found babysitters for our gigs all over the world with Alejandro Sanz, but it took a team and there were always glitches.   In the end, persistence prevails, for great and  small things alike.

We found a babysitter as late as yesterday evening and had a wonderful time at P.S. 161 today, talking about what we do and singing our song Dance.  We visited a special ed. class, a 3rd grade class and 1st grade class. The students were all lovely and bright, with hugs, smiles and lots of questions-many of them, unrelated to music- like are you married and what’s your cultural background, etc. Curious minds.

Afterwards, the adults gathered for lunch in the library, where we shared stories from the day.  I couldn’t help but shake my head when one lady told us about a boy who said he didn’t need to study because he was going to play basketball when he grew up!  I actually had a student at a different school, tell me nearly the same thing years ago.  He only showed up half the time for that after school reading program and one of those times he told me that his dad said he didn’t need any of it (the reading classes)!

Great teachers can do amazing things with young minds, but it amounts to nothing if parents don’t reinforce what’s learned, or at least support those efforts by encouraging the child!  Everybody knows this already, right?

So who are these people?

2 thoughts on “Career Day in NYC Public School & Detrimental Advice”

Leave a Reply to admin Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *