It's the season of parents' evenings, and like the football season, parents' evening
season seems to grow longer every year. Parents' evenings do vary from school to school.
Some allow the children to be present along with their parents. There are of course
advantages and disadvantages to this. If the child sits down with the parent, the teacher
is expected to know the name of that child, I suppose, but there are always a few that slip
through the net. If the child isn't there, at least the parents can tell you who it is you
are supposed to be talking about. If you don't know the child's name, there's not usually
much to say about them anyway, which makes for an excrutiating five minutes.
Some schools have a system of appointments to see each teacher, whereas others opt directly for the free-for-all that any type of system tends to disintegrate into anyway. At some schools, the timing of the parents' evening will coincide with prime-time TV viewing, which does affect the type of parents that turn up. Others are run for a few hours directly after school, meaning that commuting parents never receive any face-to-face feedback, but instead the school hall is filled with parents dragging around the broods of children they've just gathered from creche or neighbouring schools.
Parents' evenings are great from an anthropological point of view though. All those people
in one claustrophobic school hall, supressing their own schoolday memories and trying to look
like they understand what they are being told. That's the teachers and parents alike! But
whilst I often see attempts to classify teachers into types, I haven't noticed many parent
classifications. The more parents I meet, the more I realise that they fall into a range of
broad categories, and so I'm going to start my categorisation here. If you know of any further
categories, I'd be glad to hear about them. You can contact me here.
You usually know what to expect from the parents because you have, after all, got to know the child. It's at the moment when the burly red-faced father sits down that you realise that the child's cries of "I'm going to get my dad up here" because you dared to hand out a detention were no idle threat at all. Aggressive parents refuse to accept that anything, from low exam marks and incomplete homework to the CCTV footage of the canteen being trashed, is their child's fault.
Sometimes this aggression can be well hidden at first. This is the most dangerous situation, as you can be lulled into a false sense of security. After showing their child's exercise book and reeling off some targets, you may well feel that these parents could help you and support your efforts in school by ensuring their little treasure does not bring in her mobile phone / gameboy / pet rat again. This is when the aggression bubbles to the surface and splatters you all over the face.
Aggressive parents are not class-specific. There is some overlap between this category and Well-informed parents, as well as my next category...
I'm sorry to have to even mention this category at all. They don't all live in trailers of course, but if you imagine the stereotypical Jerry Springer Show brawling and interbreeding dimwits, you'll get some idea of this group of parents. It's the best reminder to stop the doziest kids snogging in the corner of the library at lunchtimes, because here you have a portent of things to come.
Trailer trash parents are usually just mother, and occasionally
just father. I award a ten point bonus if a trailer trash couple attend together.
Mother will turn up bedecked in her finest white tracksuit, hair scraped back
into a greasy ponytail, and will spend most of the appointment trying to extract her chubby
baby's fingers from the large array of gold chains she is wearing. She may stop to yell after
her toddlers who have run off to play with the other teachers' legs, or to take a call on her
flashy little mobile. She'll be extremely irritated that it's no smoking, and instead chomp
her way through a packet of chewing gum. Why she's actually there is a bit of a mystery, as
she doesn't listen to a thing you say, and you're not even sure she would understand or care anyway.
In some cases she may bring with her a sour-faced woman who could well be her mother, so that
they can gang up on you if you say anything "out of order" about their beloved child.
Trailer trash father may well belong in the "Aggressive parents" category. Or he may seize the opportunity to try his various charms on you to excuse his child's behaviour, flirting whilst skirting the issues at hand. You know he's only here to trawl the masses of single mothers who are desperate to get home in time for Neighbours.
Ah, bless, probably my favourite parents. They're not sure how to act around teachers, and still feel like they should be on their best behaviour. They've dressed smartly for the occasion and they listen really carefully to everything that you say, although there's not usually much to tell them because their child is often quiet and conscientious and, like them, wouldn't say boo to a goose. As long as you smile at them encouragingly, they leave your table thinking that they've passed the test, and everyone's happy.
There are a number of situations that can fall into this category. I'd worked in one school for over a year before I realised that I'd been teaching a fellow teacher's offspring, but it's not uncommon. More of a surprise is when a familiar face from the pub plonks themself down in front of you, but this is a good reason to live a suitable distance away from the catchment area.
Nope, the worst case scenario is when the pupil has told you way too much information
about the parent, or you have overheard it when they should have been discussing
something lesson-related. Could I ever be comfortable having a pleasant discussion
with a man when his son recently revealed to everybody that his dad has a large porno stash at the
back of his wardrobe? Or chatting with the mother who has dragged along her latest boyfriend,
who I know tells the daughter to eff off down the park when she should be sat at home
finishing her coursework? Do I really manage to keep a straight face when confronted with
the smartly-dressed mother who only last weekend had woken up her children by hammering
loudly and drunkenly on their front door, crying to be let in, because she was too pissed
to get her key in the lock?
Of course, the worrying thing is that if their child is such a blabber-mouth, what are they sitting there thinking about you...?
These are another bunch of parents that it's not always a pleasure to deal with. They come armed with statistics and an alarming awareness of acronyms and current teaching policies. In some cases, it's usually only afterwards, when you've patiently explained National Curriculum levels and where their child fits into the scheme of things, that you discover that the father is head of a neighbouring primary school and the mother is an educational psychologist. The worst, though, are those who feel it's their duty to challenge and test you, and hold you personally responsible for not spotting that their child has some rare learning disorder (that they have probably just invented) that you should have addressed in your schemes of work.
At my last parents' evening I sat there with my markbook and sheets of statistics
fanned out before me, and when the first pair of parents approached I experienced a total
blankness. I'd forgotten my lines, and shuffled my various bits of paper nervously whilst
these well-informed parents extracted sheafs of paper from a briefcase and sat there poising
pen on notepad to write down any pearls of wisdom I dared proffer. I'm all for parents
taking an active role in their child's education, but well-informed parents would be all the
better well-informed if they came to sit in their child's lessons for the day and saw for
themselves how I was not crushing their child's enthusiam, but merely requesting that the little
bugger remove his pen from his ear and sit down.
added 6/3/04
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