Five reasons why parent teacher evenings are torture:
1. All the non-working mothers grab early slots leaving me with the end of evening dregs. The problem with this is that by 7pm the teacher in question would rather be sitting at home watching Corrie with a glass of wine – and so would I.
2. There's never anything proper to sit on. I always feel at a complete disadvantage perched on one of those tiny plastic chairs. I'm sure this is a ploy by the school to keep parents in their place.
3. If I'm honest the only thing I really want to hear on parent/teacher evening is where my child is positioned in the class. But this is something you will never find out. I've tried all kinds of canny questioning to eke out this information but teachers are clever (funnily enough) and they've heard it all before. The nearest you'll get is: 'We need to work on her spellings,' or 'She seems comfortable with her level in maths..'
4. I always get stuck in the queue behind the horribly pushy parents who turn up together - because he's left work early to come along - and overrun their slot by a good twenty minutes. I'm left standing in a cold, empty corridor, torn between wanting to press my ear to the door to hear what's being said or knocking to ask them if they would – PLEASE – get a move on.
5. Whilst waiting for said pushy parents I have the opportunity to leaf through my daughter's work. This is something, I've come to believe, is best avoided. The things she writes in her literacy book must have the teacher reaching to call social services. Her entry for last weekend was this: 'Daddy was tired on Sunday (hungover) and sleeped till lunch. Mummy was cros. I was board and plaid on the DS.'
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