Conferences

This past week I had the opportunity to sit in on parent teacher conferences for a night. My CT and I discussed everything beforehand and determined that while she would handle everything with the parents of our seniors, she would get the ball rolling and then have me talk to the parents of our freshman. Everything was going pretty smoothly throughout the majority of the evening. Most of the parents were understanding and were willing to help if there was a certain area that their child was struggling, and the others were just happy to hear that their children were doing well in our class.

At around 6:50, the staff made an announcement that conferences would be ending and that all of the parents who had not yet visited with the teachers were more than welcome to come back the next day. I began packing up and preparing to head home, as a few students with their parents came in to chat with my CT (informally, not as a conference). As I finished loading up my laptop and other items that I had been working on, one of my students and her mother came in. “No big deal,” I thought to myself, “I’m really not in any rush this evening.”

I introduced myself to my students mother and the first thing she asked was, “What is the point of this book my child is reading?” Well there was something I was not expecting to end the evening with. Our students are reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, a book that, while culturally enlightening in a lot of ways, does have a lot of 15 year old male vulgarity within. I began explaining to my student’s mother just that-focusing more on the cultural enlightenment, not on the vulgarity of course. Fortunately for me, my CT and I had sent a permission slip home along with the book prior to our students’ beginning it, so we were able to use that as reinforcement. My CT came over after about a minute or two of my explaining and helped back up everything that I had said up to that point. We offered an alternative book choice in case it was a big enough issue for her daughter to continue reading the book. By this point the mother conceded and sighed that, “Well, at this point I suppose the damage has been done. Since she is so far in, I’ll let her go ahead and finish the book.”

The point that really stuck with me during all of this was something that my CT said. While the book is a little bit rough around the edges, and a lot of people might take offence to some of the content, it is important not to only challenge the students, but to challenge the teachers as well. If the teachers are not able to defend the content that they are teaching, then there is really no point in them teaching it in the first place. To this, I was happy to hear my student’s mother say, “That’s fair, and he was able to defend it well.”