Back to School Night

As a mom, I walk up the path to the school with hope and trepidation.  Probably more of the former.  As a teacher, ditto.  I think this is a good thing: when teachers and parents have similar feelings and expectations.

Tonight we finally had our Back-To-School Night. 7 weeks into the school year.  Why so late, you ask?  Dunno.  Ask the biggest education bureaucracy west of the Mississippi.  But wait, a friend whose child attends one of the best performing schools in the district told me their back-to-school night was weeks ago.  So who makes these decisions?  Again.  Dunno.  But it sure isn’t the teachers.

Back to the school, though.  You’re walking up the path past the blinking marquis, pushing through the throngs at the gate, hurrying down the long corridor to  classroom where there’s another crowd, and then, voila, you’re in.  There it is.  The place your wonderful, precious, joyous bundle spends 6 hours/day.  Maybe more time than s/he spends with you.  Tell me right off that that creates a bit of ambivalence.  A bit of overexpectation, maybe?  Come on.  Admit it.  We’re being honest here.

You quickscan the room.  Teachers, parents, anyone who’s watched a home makeover show, Elle Decor/Dwell/ Metropolitan Home readers, Sunday open-house goers– anyone can form an instadecorjudgement of a classroom.  Oooo.  Nice.  Cute.  Friendly.  Cutsie.  Dark.  Messy.  Yuck. That is called the Rainbow Decor Spectrum.

But dig in a little deeper:  Is the room inviting?  Is it child-centered?  Is indvidual expression encouraged?  How well does your kid know his/her way around it?  How much pride and ownership does s/he take in it?  What objects does s/he feel comfortable touching in it?  Are there no-touch zones?  Do you like sitting in there?

I know Back-To-School Night isn’t Open House; it’s meant for teachers to communicate general philosophies and specific requirements to the parent body at large.  But every parent walks into a room looking for his or her duckling’s doings.  Tonight, no less than seven parents out of my current twenty tried to have a private conference with me, plus two more from last year’s crew wanted to consult about their teachers this year. One even wanted to talk in the middle of my presentation.  Of course, what really matters to us is OUR kids, not the rest of the seat-fillers. I get it.  BUT.

This year, I had to work really hard to figure out a way for the rest of the seat-fillers to matter to everyone.  This class, try as I might, doesn’t get its work done.  They daydream.  They lose things.  They chatter for 5-10 minutes every time they have to switch books or journals or papers.  Multiply that by 5 times/day , and we’ve lost almost an hour of instructional time each and every day.

All day I wracked my brain at how to convey this to their parents.  I consulted with teachers from 1st and K, and they told me this cohort never got extras in K or 1 because they rarely got their work done.  Extras, these days, means Science, Social Studies, Geography, PE, Health, and Computers.  That’s a lot of missing extras.

I thought and I thought.  You don’t want to sound negative.  You don’t want to tell someone that their little sweet pea loses his pencil four times a day and her math journal twice in an hour.  I think in their heart of hearts parents already know this about their sweet peas, but that doesn’t stop anyone from happily shooting the messenger.  I understand that everyone’s kid is gifted or has special needs, that asynchronous development is a fact of human growth, and that creativity and ADD are often linked.  HOWEVER.  There are 20 kids in the class.  And ONE teacher.  Usually no aide.  No volunteers.

One human being cannot cater to twenty different paces.

I decided to put a folder on each desk cluster.  Inside that folder was was work from the last five years: newspapers the students put out every six weeks chronicling their accomplishments, learning, creativity, and computer savvy; pictures of science experiments; class books.

I encouraged the parents to look through the work.  Then I gave them each a copy of our weekly schedule with all the time blocks.  After that I explained how time was getting lost each day.  Finally, I took the folders away.

That’s what your children are missing out on by not being able to focus and get to work, I explained.  I don’t want them to miss all that.  I think that’s some of the most valuable stuff in their education.  Can we work together to make sure that it doesn’t go away?

I think, by the end of the session, I had most of the parents as allies.  One, Tomas’s mom, glared at me.  I’m worried about that one.  I know she filed a formal complaint against last year’s teacher who, not incidentally, is an excellent teacher and the teacher all of us hope we get our second graders from. Ms. Glarer’s sweat pea comes to school late many days.  Today he arrived 40 minutes late, and when the office told him we were at Art, he popped his head into the art bungalow, left, and told the office he didn’t recognize any of us.

Nevertheless, I hope I created a partnership.  With ALL of them.  Parents and teachers: we really do need to be on the same page.  Or else the kids will take over the world and play video games all day long.

Just kidding.

Sort of.