Parent-Teacher Conferences

In my excitement to post about the holidays, I overlooked posting about Parent-Teacher conferences. All grades, from preschool on up, have them. Given Justin's troubles in the fall, I was anxiously awaiting conferences as an opportunity to see how he's been progressing and talk to his teacher face to face as an in-person "barometer" of his academic and social performance.

I don't really know what I was expecting but truthfully, I was really disappointed in the whole deal. My first gripe is that I thought it was too difficult to sign up for a conference slot. Signup sheets were posted after all of the masses in the church the weekend before the conferences were scheduled, and that was the ONLY way to sign up. I was more than a little irritated about it -- the fact that the school accepts out-of-parish students means that they have families that don't belong to or attend the church. We are one of those families. Also, the school calendar that was published at the beginning of the year included the date of conferences on it, so the date was planned well in advance. Yet, parents were not able to sign up until the Saturday and Sunday immediately before the Thursday conference date. In this period of time when families' schedules book up due to working parents, extra curricular activities, juggling multiple children, and needing to arrange for child care, three days is not really enough time in advance for scheduling such an important event.

Finally, the conferences themselves were really kind of an anti-climactic non-event when all was said and done. I'd expect that in preschool, really, but we did get good, useful feedback from Tyler's teacher. The kindergarten conference included some examples of Justin's work throughout the year so that we could see for ourselves how he's changed and improved, but we didn't get much additional written or verbal feedback from his teacher outside of that. A checklist had come home about a week before the conferences that showed the various things that the kindergarten students are evaluated on, with checkmarks next to the items that the child can do satisfactorily, left blank if they need improvement. I guess that was really the barometer of his progress more than the conference itself, because I just didn't feel like we learned anything about him.

Sometimes I feel like I'm too hard on Justin's teacher. She is really a nice person and I think she handles him pretty well. He really likes her and I do feel like he's doing well in school. Maybe my years in the corporate world and suffering annual performance reviews have caused me to expect more in the way of communication than I should, especially at the kindergarten level. But the flurry of notes and negative feedback we received regarding Justin's behavior struggles early in the year did not really come up during the conferences, nor was there much opportunity for it. However, today's kindergarteners have full schedules and it's the foundation for 12 more years of school, so I guess I hoped there would be more "meat" to meeting with the teacher. I suppose I can always request a conference if I feel the need for one. We didn't receive any negative feedback about either of our boys. But if I'm being honest, I was pretty let down by the whole thing.