Teaching with Tim

     Parent conference nights are held in LAUSD several times per year-teachers open up their classrooms for about two hours, parents sign in and wait their turn to talk with the teacher.  Almost invariably, parents are interested in their student’s grade above all else.  If the grade is good, the parent is happy.  At my school you rarely hear about parents getting cantankerous over curriculum or Catcher in the Rye. If the grade is bad, the parent usually chastises the child, whose “I don’t have any homework” refrain is now revealed for the lie it always was.  I hear that sometimes parents go after the teacher for a child’s low grade, claiming that the teacher has it out for their child, but I haven’t experienced this yet.  Parents do sometimes make a fuss when they have to wait too long for their turn.  I can’t tell you how many different ways administrators have told me to “move them along”-the furtive glance at my waiting line, the hand-on-shoulder conference, chatting up the line to keep everyone happy-but it’s hard to say “yes, your daughter is an interesting case, but two-minutes interesting, not five.” I understand their concern, though-I started 10 minutes early and stayed 20 minutes after, but I still didn’t get to speak with every parent who signed in.

     Nonetheless, I left parent conference night on Thursday feeling buoyant, self-satisfied, rejuvenated.  I think it’s kind of like the satisfaction you feel as a host who has just thrown a good party-I set up snacks, student work, suggested reading lists, newspapers, and an art area for the younger sisters and brothers. All of this was well received.  Even though I’ve been at it for a few years now, presenting myself to the world as “Teacher” still feels just a little strange.  Inevitably, I get at least one “you’re so young” comment, though it isn’t every five minutes like during my first year-most parents know me at this point.  During my senior year of college, while taking classes like “The Humanistic Foundations of Education,” I was developing a revised self-concept: Tim the Teacher.  I was imagining what I wanted to be like, how I wanted to carry myself, what I wanted to represent to students and to their parents.  In a way, Thursday’s parent night represented the actualization of that self-concept, something close to the realization of my romantic “Tim the Teacher” ideal.  Parents seemed happy to have their kids in my class, and I left feeling appreciated for the work I do.  One lingering frustration is that I can’t quite bridge the culture gap-I don’t speak Spanish, and about half of the conferences are conducted through my infinitely-patient translator-but I’m taking a class in the Winter through UCLA and traveling to Ecuador in the Spring, so I’ll give my gringo Spanish a test drive during May’s conferences. 

     Now that I’ve got all that self-congratulation out of my system, I should add that a well-executed parent conference night did more than just boost my ego.  I’ve mentioned before that kids seem to slowly evolve from generic “students” to individualized human beings over the course of a year.  Parent conferences are a big part of that process.  I found out that one student whose absenteeism was frustrating me was actually staying out of school for a series of painful skin operations.  I discovered that another student has a long history of serious social anxiety.  It didn’t surprise her parents when I told them that she hides out in my room during lunch and works alone while other students talk and use the computers.  Over and over again, especially with students who I didn’t have last year, I got the sense that I was jumping in at chapter twelve of a long story that the parents had been following from the beginning-that I would have to learn about what happened during those chapters I missed if I wanted to change the direction of this one.  Talking to parents face-to-face made me feel more optimistic about being successful with my students this year-like I had allies in the struggle. 

     I shouldn’t end this entry without mentioning that Los Angeles is on fire.  Below is the view from my apartment balcony two days ago.  The palm trees in the foreground are now obscured by smoky air, which filters the sunlight and suffuses the sky with a vague orange glow.  After being outside for a couple of hours, my eyes and throat hurt from the smoke, which smells like a campfire but with the smack of something dusty and arid thrown in-like a cloud of that light brown dirt you find on the ground where cacti grow.  Mayor Villaraigosa declared a state of emergency yesterday, and if you’re interested in a shocking slideshow of fire photos, check out latimes.com.  No danger in Echo Park just yet, but the whole city has this kind of on-edge, spooked feeling, like we’re all holding our breath until the air clears.   

Photo Credit: Liz