Parent-Teacher Confrontations

Last week ended with Parent-Teacher conferences on Thursday afternoon/evening and then a welcome free day on Friday. My Friday off consisted of bringing my car to the shop for its 100,000 mile check up—but that’s another story.

I have 131 students, and had 18 conferences scheduled. This is about an average number for teachers in our building. If you teach freshmen, you will have more parents who want to see you; the new Biology teacher had 40 appointments scheduled. If you teach seniors very few will bother. I teach sophomores and juniors; almost all of them honors students, so I get a mix of parents who are concerned because their child doesn’t have an A, or their child has an A and they just want to hear how wonderful they are. I tell all my students that if they have an A to tell their parents not to schedule a conference; threatening to find something bad to say about them if their parents do. Of my 18 scheduled conferences 12 were with students that had an A.

I had identified 11 students whose parents I wanted to speak with, emailing each the week before, requesting a conference. These were underachievers or discipline problems, and only 5 of them replied--three to tell me that a meeting was impossible because of their schedule, and two to make an appointment. Both of those appointments were productive, resulting with an agreement that the student would be dropped from Honors Chemistry at semester. I will be contacting the six who didn’t reply this week to inform them that I have decided to request their child be dropped from Honors into a regular level class. I will give them one last chance to meet with me before I turn in the paper-work.

All in all the conferences went rather well; most of the conferences with a potential to go badly were not scheduled. Email is a wonderful thing because it allows me to keep a record of all correspondence with parents; something that might be helpful if a parent complains that their child was reassigned without consulting them.

Several of my problems this year stem from problems with the teacher that left last year. He had been told many times not to sign students into an advanced level of science without my permission, but ignored these directives and moved students up from basic level to regular level, and regular level to honors without my approval. This unfortunate situation has caused many of these students to struggle; requiring them to be moved back into an appropriate level this year. Parent teacher conferences always work best when teacher and parent work in partnership for the good of the student. They tend to be nonproductive and negative when they become adversarial in nature. Just ask my colleague who had a 20 minute meeting with a parent wanting to argue a single test question on a previous exam. The student in question had a 102% average in her class.