I HAVE made a decision. I am not going to any more parent-teacher meetings. My daughter is in a state of sheer delight and I suppose I will have to come to another arrangement with the school, but after my last experience I have decided that they are a total waste of time. They take place now during the teachers' working day, so if you are parent who works outside the home you must take the time off. In my case it meant a half-day of my annual leave.
Missing out on lunch to get there in time, I encountered traffic jams and hold-ups and arrived at the school, hungry and agitated, to find I had to queue for every teacher. I started with the form mistress. I had the bad luck to be behind parents who hogged her, so when it came to my turn she was constantly looking at her watch and wondering how many more parents were waiting. I didn't feel I was getting her undivided attention. In fact, that was the criticism she levelled against my daughter. When I compared notes with two other parents, we had all been given more or less the same spiel. I came away feeling she just wasn't sure who my daughter was.
The next teacher admitted she couldn't put names to faces, because she had just recently taken over from the permanent teacher who was on maternity leave. Fair enough. But what was the point of more than 30 parents queuing up to hear this? My daughter had given me a list of teachers and their subjects with her own description of their personalities. I queued for The Cynic. She taught French and was sorry now that she hadn't opted to teach Spanish. She didn't like French or The French. She had class test results but couldn't find my daughter's. Then I met The Swot. She told me she was working on a PhD on Thomas Hardy and was delighted to talk about Far From the Madding Crowd, which I had watched on TV the night before. She was disappointed that my daughter wasn't interested in reading - so was I - but had no ideas on how to get her to turn off the TV and computer and pick up a book.
The Fascist was next. She taught my daughter's weakest subject, so I decided to broach the subject of a grind. "I wouldn't waste my money if I were you." She launched forth on how she particularly disliked the class my daughter was in - they were badly behaved and badly motivated. She kept them back after school regularly and there was still no improvement.
After two hours I decided to give up. I was no more enlightened about my daughter's progress - any comment about her was a generalisation that could apply to anyone in the class. At home that night I told her I was going to start a campaign for children to come to the meeting, so at least teachers would know about whom they are meant to be commenting. "No, the boycott is a much better idea," she replied earnestly.
