Learning is a lifelong pursuit – and I’ve just grasped that I might be a half-decent parent
IT seems something of a miracle that I managed to avoid attending parentteacher meetings until last week. I always had great excuses for not being there – either work or just a complete lack of interest in going – but the day finally came where I could no longer avoid it, as this wasn’t just any parent-teacher meeting, but the only one of my daughter’s Junior Cert cycle.
This was Serious Business – no more chats from disinterested national school teachers about colouring inside the lines or how good the child is at sharing; this was a serious talk about the foundations of a life and career – this was education with a clear purpose. So I stuck on a tweed waistcoat so I would look more erudite, had a quick peruse of memorable quotes from Pearse’s ‘The Murder Machine’ in case it kicked off, and headed along.
As soon as I walked into my daughter’s school, I felt a familiar sense of dread. The nicotine-yellow walls, hand-crafted motivational posters with ‘positivity’ and
‘prayer’ written in gradually diminishing fonts, the dead light from halogen bulbs – this was an anxiety dream made real, all it needed was my teeth to fall out or for me to wet myself, which seemed increasingly likely as I was starting to panic.
I was given a printed guide to the classrooms, informing me which teachers were in which rooms. It might as well have been written in Sanskrit.
I tried to read my daughter’s report card to match up some names, imagining the teachers as depressed Pokemon, adamant that I was gonna catch ‘em all. Queues formed with no beginning and no end, with no-one quite sure who or what they were queueing for. I started to wonder if this was a test in itself, if we were the ones being secretly graded and judged by the Department of Education. I’m very clever for thinking that, I thought to myself, wishing there was someone else around in a tweed waistcoat who would appreciate my tremendous wit. No, I thought, save it for the column – this sort of grand insight is the premium content that my readers deserve. Eventually a helpful transition year student saw I was struggling and guided me to a corner, and there I was, the perennial buachaill dána, back in bold boys’ corner. All I was short was a dunce cap. Finally I got out of the corner and got facetime with some teachers. The first told me about the class and their self-care plan for the year ahead. In my day, self-care was a sin and they said you went blind from doing it. I moved on to the next teacher, who was full of praise for my daughter, saying how hard she worked, how she was a pleasure to teach. The next teacher was the same, and the next. As I moved from one to the other, I started to get more and more emotional, and by the time I got to the fourth teacher I was blinking back tears.
IT’S a strange thing to realise that you might be an OK parent. We spend so much time fretting about passing on all our bad habits and mistakes, that it is extraordinary to think that we might be raising someone who will be better than us. In theory, every generation should be some sort of upgrade – it didn’t work that way for my poor parents, who used to have to grit their teeth for my parent-teacher meetings, as all but the art and English teachers said I was going nowhere fast.
Perhaps a knock-on of that experience is that I would give myself a C– as a parent – fair to poor, could do better. After my daughter’s parent-teacher meeting, I realised that my wife and I might actually be getting a solid B+ – there was always room for improvement if we worked hard, but we weren’t failing by any stretch of the imagination. It feels good to know your best might just be enough.
That said, my self-satisfied bubble burst when I got home and my wife and daughter realised I left the parent-teacher meeting without talking to half the teachers. The biggest shock of the night wasn’t that my daughter had given up history, but that anyone is allowed to give up history. I had assumed it was compulsory, but apparently not, which I assume is also the case in the UK, where there seems to be a lot of cramming about what the Empire may or may not have done to its neighbours over the centuries.
The current stumbling blocks over Brexit and the Border seem to cause confusion with many on ‘the mainland’, as they wonder what they ever might have done to deserve such a hardline approach from the Irish Government.
Presumably the same people avoided watching Ken Loach’s ‘The Wind That Shakes The Barley’ as they assumed it was a documentary about the impact of agriculture on climate change, or ‘In The Name Of The Father’ because they thought it was one of those ‘Jeremy Kyle Show’ DNA test specials. Yet while there may be some gaps in the UK’s educational policy when it comes to its own history, it is great to see so many people frantically try to brush up on several centuries of imperial unpleasantness in the space of a week. Here’s to lifelong learning.