Parent-Teacher Conferences: Lessons Learned

Okay, guys, when people told me teaching was hard, I believed them and so I took the precautionary measures that I thought were enough... but teaching is even harder than I thought!   I hadn't prepared for parent-teacher conferences.

Lesson learned this time: you must contact the parents. Often. The more annoying you are, the better.  At the first sign of distress, no matter how slight.  If you do not, come report cards time, the parents WILL blame YOU for their child's failures or almost failures, even if the student was at least partially to blame.  I am experiencing this the hard way.

So my adventure behind the desk (good thing I was behind it, or I would've been destroyed):

What I have learned from this marking period is that what I thought was being informative to the parents was not what is being informative to the parents. I did send home papers and sheets home, saying what assignments were missed when, asking for a parent signature; I am only in the building once a week, which puts constraints on how many phone calls I can make (since for professional reasons I can only use the phone at school to make these phone calls).  I updated the website.  I thought I was doing all the right things.  The one thing I didn't mention was the actual grade the student was getting. You see, there were a lot of problems with the school's online grading system which wreaked a lot of havoc, especially for me, who did not yet have a working account when progress reports came out.  I went to the school and handwrote the grades in, with comments - however, not all the parents got a handwritten progress report. I have no idea how that happened, since I was there, personally handling and writing on every progress report, for every grade, for every student.  Yet, I was not informed that these progress reports weren't received by which students.  And then there was Hurricane Sandy (thanks a lot, nature) 2 weeks before the 1st quarter ended. And then the quarter ended, and my grades were incomplete.  Never mind the reasons - the point is, I didn't get to contact the parents about the grades.  Now I am dealing with it.  I had a meeting on Friday with parents that lasted for 1.5 hours - usually, to give you an idea of it, conferences are supposed to last maybe 20 minutes.  It was long and difficult for me to get through, but I survived it.  When I got home, there were 4 more emails from parents waiting for me, and if I went to the school, I can bet that there are probably other notices waiting for me to answer in my inbox.  I'm not entirely looking forward to it, and now I have to explain that due to my inexperience with the online grading system (and just my inexperience in general), I hadn't weighted the grades properly, so now a lot of the grades that were on the report cards are different and have changed for the better.  I'm only hoping I can survive this all without looking like a total, incompetent fool, and without the kids feeling disheartened or unmotivated by a bad grade.

So, my lesson for any aspiring teachers is this: when you set aside time in the week to plan your standards-based lessons/units and grade papers etc, also set aside some time to plan how many/which parents you are going to contact each week.  If you have over 100 students like I do, this seems very overwhelming, but it's very necessary to avoid major headaches, anxiety attacks, and feelings of depression like the ones I had this weekend.

Besides saving yourself the pain of 400 angry conferences later, it is also important to know that you can learn very many things about teaching and about the students by talking to the parents, no matter what their attitudes are when they come to talk to you.  I've had a mixed bag with parents - some are very happy to work with you and cooperative and friendly, and others will come to you as though you have committed a felony.  Yet, as a new teacher, you must realize early on that you are learning how to be a teacher, and largely parents are there because they are concerned for their child's future, not because they have a personal vendetta against you.  If you show that you are listening, and acknowledge any part that may be your fault (and there is bound to be some occasionally even for the best new teachers), and yet stick to your guns about what their child needs to do, things work out and everyone can leave the room feeling like something was accomplished (or, in some cases, like a bomb that was about to explode was defused in the nick of time).  I often try to talk about other things completely unrelated to the topic at hand when I first meet them to show that I'm a caring human being and normal, and that I'm not on a personal vendetta to ruin children's lives.  Middle school is hard enough without adding the stress of school on top of it [l o l].

Okay, my brain is fried... please pray that I will survive the end of this first quarter!!!