Turning the tables on the teacher
Navigating school as a parent is a chaotic blend of confusion, criticism, and a kid's secret life.
Parenting a school-age kid is a weird experience of confusion, bureaucracy and misinformation. You’re left at the mercy of multiple, non-interoperable IT “platforms” to do things as basic as pay for your kid’s milk, and unable to persuade the child in question to give you even the slightest insight about what they’ve been doing there all day.
It’s a black box of education: you drop them off in the morning, stuff happens for eight hours, then you collect them again, clothes stained with paint/food/bodily fluids, with a line drawing of a classmate doing a poo as the only thing to show for it.
This mystifying experience, perhaps, was what led me to wrongly accuse one of my five-year-old son’s teachers of poor support for his literary development, in the course of an otherwise-innocuous Parents’ Evening earlier this week.
School’s out
My son is into his second year of school now which means I’m confident enough to breeze casually into the playground for drop-off and pick-ups as all the new, reception-age parents are nervously fussing over their kid and trying to figure out this new routine.
A year ago, that was me too: did I pack the pair of yellow socks he inexplicably needs to wear today because it’s International Honey Bee Awareness Month or something? Will his teacher read the note I’ve carefully written in his reading diary to explain how we talked about punctuation and grammar in The Gruffalo? Did I remember to make him practice his joined-up handwriting?
These days we’re cynical, seen-it-all-before parents, barely glancing back at our kids as they run inside the school gates. So it was when I found myself in my son’s actual classroom this week, and was momentarily teleported 33 years back in time, into a room that looked much the same, with the exception of the Windows 10 desktop computer hiding in the corner.
Flicking through his neatly-stacked schoolbooks while we waited for the teacher to call us through, I was struck by the range of material he’s covered in the scant six weeks of school so far this term. Whenever I ask what he’s been doing all day I get “I can’t remember” or “I don’t want to tell you”, and if I resort to bribery, the best he can muster is “we learned about castles”, or the stark phrase “toys through the ages”.
This child, though, had filled workbooks with stories, sums, illustrated religious parables(!) and glued-in photos of his classmates and their activities. How could I find out more from him when we were back at home?!
What I Go To School For
As we pondered the meaning of all this, a teacher arrived to bring us through to the meeting room.
It was all innocuous enough: a summary of their lessons so far, a quick dive through Ted’s development and areas of interest, and a cursory “do you have any questions for us”. I rumbled into life.
“Well, to be honest, we’ve been a bit unhappy with some things…” I began, and the vibe in the room immediately pivoted from “great-we’re-all-about-to-get-out-of-here” to “oh-shit-what’s-he-going-to-say”, including from my partner Maddy who sat next to me, trying to persuade our 16-month-old toddler to stay quiet by filling her entire mouth with banana popcorn bites.
I went on to explain, suddenly in the headlight-glare of two primary school teachers, that I was disappointed in how easy the books they’d sent home were compared to Reception, but more specifically, that Ted had been nominated to bring in a book from home one week, and the book he’d chosen—a non-fiction book about amazing space facts—wasn’t read out to the rest of the class and he was told he’d brought in the wrong kind of book.
“No, absolutely not – we shared it with everyone!”, one of the teachers immediately corrected me. I stopped short, suddenly embarrassed and uncertain. Was… was my child a liar? My… my wily, calculating, uncomfortably-aware son, able to manipulate me or provide a less-than-accurate picture of events? Of course he fucking can, why was I representing his words as gospel to two people who are paid to teach him things?!
I lowered myself back into my child-size chair again and felt like one too (a child, not a chair, though I certainly felt sat on). I reflected on how strange it felt to have criticisms—valid or not—of something I don’t pay for, much like the NHS. When the standard isn’t what I’d expect, it’s almost certainly because of budget cuts, overwork, crumbling infrastructure or political salami-slicing. The individuals concerned are doing their best in a shitshow of a situation. What right do I have to even consider complaining about it?
I don’t have a good answer to this. Clearly there’s a line for what’s acceptable, and my vague complaint about better recognition of non-fiction and encouraging boys to read more was hardly the stuff of great outrage. I felt very conscious in that moment of being a man in a roomful of women, making what turned out to be a poorly-informed criticism and then immediately folding. Next time, I’m just going to smile and ask about phonics.
Mini-feels this week
Smells Like Helen Mirren
Helen Mirren is going viral today for her quote about, um, dead rock stars and satellite navigation technology:
“I always say it’s so sad that Kurt Cobain died when he did because he never saw GPS, as it’s the most wonderful thing to watch my little blue spot walking down the street. I just find it completely magical and unbelievable.”
Apparently she brings him up all the time in relation to various technical achievements he would’ve missed after dying in 1994, so it’s not quite the non-sequitur it seems. Perhaps she could’ve just expressed her general sense of wonder about all the great innovations that have happened since the mid-90s, though.
I share her fascination, though: not with post-Nirvana technology, but just with making quite boring observations about the passing of time. That thing about us being closer to the time of Cleopatra than she was to the construction of the Pyramids… I love it. I calculate these things in relation to my own age: how old was Bowie when he recorded Space Oddity? If I started now, could I still write my magnum opus before he did? (no)