Parents' Evenings

At primary school, Parents’ Evenings have significantly more worth that they do at secondary school. You teach 30 students, you teach nearly all subjects to these 30 students and you teach them nearly all of the time. Consequently, you know them inside out and can be lucid, insightful and comprehensive in the judgments and perceptions that you share with their parents when they come to see you.

At secondary school, you teach hundreds of students. You usually just teach them one subject, and depending on what that is, you have contact with most of these between one and four lessons a week. Never mind knowing them inside out, if the Parents’ Evening falls within the first term and you happen to be their Drama or Music teacher, then you’re lucky if you even know their name when their parents sit down in front of you.

There’s an obvious flaw in a system that sends 11-year-olds from the responsibility of one main teacher in primary school to about a dozen in secondary school. But that’s a serious debate for another forum. The question here is this: What do you do when a student and accompanying parents plonk themselves down in front of you and you don’t have a fucking clue as to who they are?

A slight frown as you survey your appointment sheet, before turning it towards the student and saying:

Did you make an appointment? I can’t see your name written down here.

The student is thus prompted into finding his or her own name on your sheet, pointing to it and saving your embarrassment in front of the parents.

Unless of course, the parents are teachers and know this trick!

You will make two paradoxical assumptions every parents evening. One is that no one’s parents are themselves teachers. The other is that, despite this, they will still understand everything you say to them in your own language of teacherspeak.

A third, separate assumption, is that what you want to tell them and what they want to know comfortably coincide. Most parents want to know, in order of importance:

1. How clever is their kid compared to others in the class?
2. Are they behaving?
3. Are they working hard?
4. What, in general terms, does the child need to do to improve?
5. Can you control the class?

Most teachers want to say, in order of importance:

1. What level or grade they are currently on, compared to their target and what this actually means.
2. How much progress they have made in terms of their levels, grades, sub-levels or sub-grades.
3. How hard they’re working.
4. How nice they are.
5. How they can improve, in specific terms with reference to the demonstrable skills required in your subject.

So, a small overlap there, then! It is uncommon for teachers to ask the obvious question to a parent sitting before them:

What would you like to know?

The main reason for this is because you are Lost in Teaching and feel the compulsion to deliver a lengthy monologue as soon as parents sit down. A secondary reason is because when you once tried asking that question the answer from the parent was unhelpfully vague:

Teacher: So, what would you like to know?
Parent: How she’s getting on.

This is the point at which you risk looking a dick right from the start by cheerfully responding with a throwaway line about how well the child is doing. You say this, because you don’t recall having any reason to tell her off. Then you look at your mark book and realise that the child is way below target, working inconsistently and a bit crap at doing homework. Straight away you now have to back-peddle.

You squirm your way out of that mess and begin to search your limited pool of cliché excuses for underachievement, swiftly settling for the most vague of constructive criticisms:

Well, she has tended to be a little chatty and easily distracted in class recently.

You temper this revelation with the words recently and little in order to avoid the accusation that you should have contacted the parents as soon as a problem became evident. Many parents will encourage you to ring them anytime there is a problem, which is easier said than done given the time needed to get their number, to phone, leave a message, (feel awkward about the fact that they have a humorous voicemail message on their mobile, Krusty the Clown being my favourite) and then have to ring back after they’ve rang you back while you were teaching and left a message for you, (feeling awkward that the school has a ill-humoured receptionist taking messages.)

The problem with identifying the root cause of a student’s underachievement as the existence of disruption in your lesson is that you’ve given a red rag to the more bullish of parents.

Parent: Is there a lot of disruption in your class?

How do you answer that? If you do have problems with behaviour management, either because you’re (a) newly qualified, (b) unluckily burdened with a difficult group, (c) unfortunate to be working in a school with endemic behaviour problems or (d) just plain crap and in the wrong job, then are you actually going to admit to any of these? Once again, you feel forced to dilute your comments.

The art of diluting, backtracking or wholly changing the emphasis of your judgments on a student, is often applied as you adapt to the responses of parents. For those who appear stricter, who give their child murderous looks as soon as you begin to mention anything even slightly negative, you’ll find yourself turning defence lawyer and trying to appease their wrath in case your testimony turns out to be the final evidence tipping the scales towards a subsequent private execution later that evening at home. For those parents who appear annoying blasé and cheerful, despite the fact that their child has been a lazy, disruptive and disobedient shithead in your class since September, you’ll be tempted to lay the criticism on extra thick with a trowel until it is clear that there is no redeeming quality or positive remark they could possibly dig out of you.

Of course, some parents can be equally defensive and will almost apologetically list the strategies they have used to encourage their child to work or behave:

Parent: We do tell him he must listen to the teacher and be respectful and do as he’s told.
Teacher: (Thinks) Amazing how he’s turned out so naughty when you’ve used such excellent parenting skills!

One of the most common defensive admissions from parents regards homework:

Parent: Well I send him to his room every night to do homework, so I assume he’s been doing it.
Teacher: (Thinks) Well, that’s your job done isn’t it! No need to actually go into his room to see if he’s doing it or ask to see it afterwards. I mean, what else could a teenager be doing in his bedroom with only his homework, his phone, his telly, his games console and maybe even his own laptop computer for distraction?

Some parents are actually more unhelpfully proactive in supporting their child’s homework. Directing the child towards a particular website, so they know what to copy and paste and try to pass off as their own work is one such crime. Reading that text through with their child to help them change some of the more difficult vocabulary in order to unsuccessfully fool the teacher into believing that it’s been written in the child’s own words, is another. And, perhaps more laudable, but not significantly more helpful is the purchase of a set of encyclopaedias, done with the erroneous assumption that everything you need to know about everything is contained within those volumes:

Parent: Well, she uses our encyclopaedias a lot to do her homework.
Teacher: (Thinks) That explains the 3-sentence project she’s just done on the Rainforest.

The final defence is a show of confusion over why an interest in a certain subject isn’t passed on genetically:

Parent: I don’t know why she’s not interested. I always loved Science at school.

This kind of comment can sometimes lead to the focus of the meeting switching from child to parents, as you’re told all about the parent’s school days. That’s the thing about teaching. Everyone’s been to school, so parents will always have something to say about their schooldays, believing that it will be of interest to you.

I admit I have iced this cake with a thick layer of cynicism so far. Personally, I have always enjoyed Parents’ Evenings. Most people are nice to talk to and when you know a child, it is always interesting and quite often a pleasure to meet the parents, particularly if you have nice things to say or if that child happens to be a really nice person. There’s much satisfaction to be had when letting parents know that their child not only works well, but is also happy and pleasant around school.

Everybody loves to be flattered, so anything positive said about a child will fill a parent with pride and reflected glory. For some reason, they are also flattered when you guess who they are, despite not having met them before and despite them turning up without their child:

Teacher: Hello! Rosie’s mum, isn’t it?
Parent: Yes (smiles.) How did you know?
Teacher: (Thinks) I won’t answer that, because the reality is that her breezeblock shaped chin and overlarge head are a dead giveaway.

Of course, flattery is one thing and flirting is another. When you’re a young teacher, beware the recently divorced / separated or single parent. If they fancy you, then box 2 on their desirable partner criteria list is also automatically ticked, because you clearly like children and consequently you become ideal stepparent material. It was once suggested to me by a single mum of a naughty boy that if his teacher were to come round to dinner, it might prompt him into behaving himself. His teacher happened to be engaged at the time and his mum had the sort of teeth that would allow her to eat an apple through a letterbox, so I can’t say I was tempted. But I am sure that conversations between teachers either side of a Parents’ Evening about MILFs and DILFs, or even sometimes SILFs and BILFs and later in your teaching career GILFs, are not unusual. Should you ever be tempted to flirt with a parent, bear in mind that in Jacqueline Wilson novels a child will often contemplate suicide when faced with the idea of her teacher going out with her Mum or Dad.