Who enjoys parent teacher conferences?
If your child’s school is anything like the one that my younger daughters attend, there is no such thing as an open house anymore. We no longer go in at the beginning of the school year to see the classroom and meet the teacher. In fact, the parents do not meet the teacher face to face until the parent teacher conferences. So as one can imagine, there is a lot of stress and anxiety that can ride on this first meeting at the end of the first quarter. Depending on the student and the teacher that fifteen minutes can be extremely quick or painfully slow.
When I was a kid, the school district that I lived in only offered day time parent teacher conferences and for my truck driving dad, it was an unpaid day off the road. As one can imagine, he was never a happy camper on conference day and that compound with the desire to do my best in school, it was always a rough afternoon for both he and I. My dad would always drag us out and make us play unattended on the elementary playground which would have not flown now. It would not be uncommon for me to attempt to peak in or sit under an open window to hear what was being said. I frequently earned straight A’s and did not receive negative comments from the teachers. All that worry was absolutely nothing.
As for my girls, the anticipation was worst than the actual parent teacher conferences themselves. We went to the youngest daughter’s first since we had the exact same teacher for our middle daughter last year and both of my husband and I knew what we were going to get with that teacher. Then we walked down the hallway to the middle daughter’s classroom, but stopped at the door as there was another set of parents in the room. We got a little nervous about the amount of feedback that we heard from the open door that continued to radiate down the hallway. All of our worry was for not as the teacher had high praises for our daughter. We had survived the parent teacher conferences for our girls and hopefully they are the last ones for the school year.
So at the end of the day, does the teacher or the parent have more fun with this? It appeared with meeting with both teachers that they had prepared notes, gathered classwork and allowed us to take a couple of things home for each child. My husband teaches high school and he also does a lot of prep work before the conferences. I cannot speak for him on which one he likes best, but I am glad that they are over!
