School Days
Five times a year, you sit in a hall in your coat, smiling at the streams of parents who perch anxiously opposite you. The evenings are emotionally exhausting and, after a full teaching day, leave us drained. But they have their advantages, too.
Last night was one such night. Three hours of parents after five hours of teaching. We don’t – we can’t – look forward to them. We joke about how we’ll finally get our revenge on some child who makes our lives a misery – but those children and their parents are unlikely to turn up. So what are we left with?
The two real joys of parents’ evenings come from very different parts of my heart. One is the proper, kind teacher side of me. I realise, when the good children turn up, how incredibly lucky I am to be teaching such an amusing, diverse, hard-working group of young people. Sometimes in the thick of battle you can forget the good soldiers. You are pleased with them and you congratulate them, but most of your effort is expended on the ones you have to cajole or control or console.
The other joy of parents’ evenings is less honourable and maybe a bit sinister. I’m a nosy person. I’m interested in other people. If I travel on a train, I mentally write my fellow passengers’ histories.
And I do the same, sometimes, with my pupils. Meeting the parents gives me a whole different perspective on the children. Sometimes it raises questions; sometimes it answers them.
One area of interest is which parent comes. It is very rare that the father attends on his own; increasingly common that both parents come. (I don’t think you would ever have caught my father, the journalist Auberon Waugh, at any of his four children’s parents’ evenings.)
Some separated parents arrive together. Others sit awkwardly together, competing as to who can demonstrate more interest in the hunched-looking child between them. Others insist on separate appointments, which I always slightly resent.
The parents’ attitudes to you, and to the school, are also quite a giveaway. Some sit awkwardly, panicking, repeating everything you say back to the child and silently begging the child to take advantage of school. You can see (and they often admit to) their own failed educations, the strict and furious teachers and the skived lessons.
Others treat teachers like second-class citizens. (‘Mummy says you have come down in the world,’ one child once said to me.) These are mostly the middle classes, who feel that they are ‘experimenting’ by sending their children to state schools.
These are the parents who defend their chickens to the last, sure that their darlings never put a foot wrong, are misunderstood and aren’t stretched enough. One child once stuck up for me to her furious parent: ‘Actually, Mum, Miss is right. I never do my homework. I don’t do any work. I talk a lot.’
Seeing how the children interact with their parents is also a giveaway. You see the class show-off, who with his parents sits silent and anxious; the child who sits through the meeting on his mobile, with no hint from the parent that this is rude. You suddenly realise the anxious child in class is caring for her disabled mother, or the really hard-working one is doing everything he can to make his single father proud. You see which parents are pushy, which are anxious and which care barely enough to turn up. You see children turn up with social workers and older siblings (somehow, this is particularly touching), and sometimes even on their own because a parent can’t or won’t come.
On parents’ evenings, we see the world in miniature pass us by. So, although we complain about them and go home weary, we should never forget that they are as much part of our understanding of the children as they are part of the parents’ understanding of their children’s education.