Parent-teacher conferences. I’m ready, I’ve carefully booked all my 5-minute slots in the app, and I’ve written down the questions I want to ask.
It’s time for my turn with the French teacher. I sit down and introduce myself. He writes our last name in his little notebook, along with the time. He tells me about my son, his behavior in class, his results. It’s all very quick and perfectly generic, and I can hardly hold it against him, it’s a difficult exercise. Then he asks whether I have any questions.
As it happens, my son sent me in to raise a thorny issue: binder organization. At the beginning of the year, the teacher had everyone sign a three-way commitment between himself, the students, and the parents, stating that the students would keep a neatly organized binder. But my son has been struggling to live up to that commitment, and he told me so. And I have to admit that when I read the instructions myself… I don’t understand them either.
So I explain my difficulties to the teacher and, while I’m speaking, I see him tense up and draw an arrow next to our name and then, at the end of the arrow, write: “pushy parent”. I’m neither surprised nor thrown, and I carry on with the parallel conversation we are now having. After he finishes explaining that I’m not supposed to understand the instructions because they are addressed to my son, I allow myself to point out:
– By the way, Schapira is spelled “S-C-H”.
– I beg your pardon?
– There, in your notebook. Schapira is “S-C-H”. You forgot the “C”.
In the space of a few seconds, I watch the whole scene play out in his eyes. He realizes that I can read his notebook upside down, then it dawns on him that I may well have seen the arrow and the words “pushy parent” that he wrote. He wonders whether there is any chance I didn’t and, while continuing to tell me more or less complete nonsense, I watch him carefully flip his pencil around and erase “pushy parent” from the notebook.
We politely say goodbye and wish each other a good day.
And I’m left with an anecdote I won’t be able to post on the blog for several months, perhaps years, best not to while there is still any chance my son might run into this teacher again, and one that makes me smile every time I think about it.
In our house, there is no “Parent 1” and “Parent 2”1. There is Parent 1, and me, “Pushy Parent”.
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In France, “Parent 1” and “Parent 2” are the terms used in administrative forms to refer to the two parents in a family, without specifying their gender. ↩