Parent-Teacher Conferences

Newsletter 2024-10-18

There’s no audio version for this email. I’m on day three of the cold my kids have so kindly been swapping back and forth between them. It’s the one time they believe in sharing.

I got weird vibes from parent-teacher conferences this week. Someone was definitely lying. The teachers told my wife Lola and me about polite, well-behaved children who allegedly belonged to us but who bear little resemblance to the offspring we see at home. At school, they’re allegedly able to work in perfect harmony elbow-to-elbow with dozens of other kids. That’s a far cry from at home, where, if asked to accomplish a simple task like folding their laundry within line-of-sight of each other, they’re sure to start World War 3. I should be grateful my daughters are the best versions of themselves at school rather than at home. There’s a finite amount of good behavior in the universe. If you use up all of your manners in your own house where no one can see you, all that’s left is for you to be a monster in public. That explains a hundred percent of road rage incidents. The angriest drivers in traffic are the nicest people to their families and neighbors. Either that or some individuals are legitimately awful and should be expelled from society. I nominate anyone who turns up the bass so high that it shakes the windows on my house. If I can detect your vehicle on the Richter scale, you deserve to be yeeted from civilization by a catapult. It would be a much quieter world, other than that faint thud in the distance.

I shouldn’t have been surprised that my kids’ teachers lied to me. They were practically kids themselves. Lucy’s fifth grade teacher just graduated from college last spring, and Waffle’s first grade teacher got out the spring before. To me, teachers will always be gnarled, ancient figures who have held their jobs for approximately a thousand years. At my Catholic high school, that wasn’t far from the truth. The principal was fond of scooping up bored, retired public school teachers with the promise that this would be an easy gig for their later years. They signed their contracts before they realized having religion class once a day didn’t make us any less awful. We just knew we were sinning while we were doing it. Knowledge is half the battle. Guilt is the other half. You now understand Catholicism well enough to make it through Confirmation.

I will always regard teachers as the adultiest adults. They were the authority figures who held my future in their hands. One A minus and I’d be doomed to working in a coal mine. That’s what I told myself, anyway. In reality, I probably could have skirted by with B’s and C’s and still ended up roughly where I am now. In the end, mediocrity claims us all. I can’t wrap my head around meeting teachers who are closer in age to my kids than to me. It’s an experience I’ve been having more and more lately. I’m nearly forty in a country where men have a life expectancy of seventy-seven. More of society is younger than me than older than me. That might be the single most depressing sentence I’ve ever written. The people in charge of teaching my children about the world have been in that world for roughly half as long as I have. The school has grizzled, veteran teachers, too. This year, my girls just happened to get the young ones. Lucy and Waffle both love their respective teachers. I’m the only one upset because the teacher’s extreme youth reminds me of my own mortality. Next year, I’d like for them to have old teachers again so I can feel young by comparison. I want educators who look like they woke up after a thousand years in a sarcophagus. Maybe Ramesses II is available to sub.

We didn’t have traditional parent-teacher conferences for the older girls. For Mae, who is in seventh grade, the school required student-led conferences. We went to the middle school together where Mae walked us through a folder with her grades. If we had any questions, there were teachers for individual subjects on hand. The approach made sense. When you’re not with the same teacher all day, you can’t exactly do normal conferences. That would be hundreds of meetings per teacher. I’m not capable of remembering that many names, let alone giving detailed reports connected to each one. I don’t even look at most people that closely. If you change your hair, there’s a good chance I’ll no longer know who you are. I’d make a terrible teacher. Even on the last day of school, I’d still be calling everyone, “Hey, you.”

Mae’s grades were great, not that I was concerned. She’s a good student, and the stakes are low. Your middle school GPA has no bearing on your future career. Depending on your field, your high school and college GPAs might not, either. Thanks, English degree. My freshman, Betsy, is making harder choices. She wants to be a doctor. Ironically, she’s the only one of the kids who didn’t have a conference of any kind. We can see her grades online. She’s doing well. My only concern is the entire direction of her life.