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Parents Go Back To Middle School

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By Cheryl  Bentley | The Suncoast News

Published: October 8, 2008

Cheyenne Moore was looking forward to her mom Tracy's meeting her friends.

"I always talk about my friends to my mom, and she'll get to meet them," the 11 year old explained as the two stood in a hall at Gulf Middle School in New Port Richey waiting for Cheyenne's science class to begin.

Tracy Moore was one the roughly 70 parents who attended the school's sixth annual Bring Your Parent to School Day last Friday.

"Welcome back to middle school," Principal Stan Trapp told the parents at an orientation meeting. During the day, parents followed their children to classes, to lunch and as in the case of the Moores, even as they waited in the hall for class to begin.

He had told his teachers it was business as usual, Trapp explained. To give parents a taste of the real world at school, he had advised teachers to avoid creating special lessons for the day.

Moore was a veteran of the event. She had attended previous Bring Your Parent days when her son Dylan, now 17, went to Gulf Middle School. Watching students mingle, she commented how the halls seem quieter now than when Dylan attended the school.

Previous Bring Your Parents helped her get a sense of teachers' styles, she noted. "You could almost see how they were communicating. You can see how they relate to the students." That made for a better understanding in assessing classroom dynamics, she said.

In Joseph Ruggiero's science class that staple of science classrooms for generations, the Periodic Table of the Elements, hung on the classroom wall, bridging older and younger generations. Ruggiero was winding down a unit using material on scientists to teach students to compare and contrast and read for the five Ws - who, what, when, where and why - to sift out the main points of the scientists' lives.

In the class that Moore attended, students and parents watched a film on Marie Curie, pioneering scientist in the field of radioactivity. He chose Curie because he wanted his students to learn about a female scientist in a field in which men are more widely publicized, Ruggiero said.

Moore left the class unsure of the overall subject matter. "I'm not sure what they were studying. The elements? The science of radiology?"

But she appreciated the film, remarking that it was an engrossing method to educate about Curie, and noted that Cheyenne enjoyed Ruggiero's teaching.

In Cheyenne's physical education class, Moore and another mother, Jennifer McCarthy, compared notes about the age-old problem of parents making inappropriate comments in the eyes of their pre-teens and teenagers. Moore confessed Cheyenne had asked her, "Please don't do anything to embarrass me today."

"They just told me, 'Don't talk,' " McCarthy responded about her twins, Hanna and Haley.

Another mom, Susie McDowell, was also a veteran attendee of the event. She had previously gone to two other Bring Your Parent days. Her son, 13-year-old Kyle, pronounced those previous years "pretty cool" after admitting before the first event, he hadn't been all that sure about the advantages of his mom sitting in on his classes.

This year, he was looking forward to her seeing a debate between him and classmate Mina Martin on whether males or females were the stronger sex. In his gifted social studies class, teacher Jason Rucci said, such activities were common in his class and were a good way for parents to see what goes on there.

During the debate Kyle and Mina sparred good-naturedly over the merits of their sex in front of an engaged audience. Following Rucci's invitation, parents Bill Rutherford and Rich Martin gave the two gentle pointers on how to make their cases stronger.

In the previous period, McDowell had attended a business class in which the students were studying Microsoft Word and would learn Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint in the future. She approved of the emphasis on real-world learning in both the business and Rucci's classes.

"The skills they are learning here will help them in a lot of different areas of their lives," she noted.

Cheryl Bentley can be reached at 727-815-1069 or cbentley@suncoastnews.com.

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