To think teachers won't say your DC is a little shit at parents evening?!

[overcovermultitasker]

It's parents evening ( via zoom) and our class WhatsApp is blazing with how wonderful all the DCs are However the class has loads some nightmare children and is known as boisterous bxxx class. Do teachers ever say anything negative or are these parents unable to read between the lines? Many of these DCs are on the poor end of the behaviour wall chart on a daily basis from their own admissions. I don't know, I suppose teachers have to focus on each child's positives ?

I must be the only person to have not bragged. Main issues I would say are many spoilt brats, who don't follow instructions, they push, shove, uncaring. Do teachers says anything?

Yes you can day that they are, perhaps, not as well behaved as they maybe could be but there are ways that we phrase it that are hopefully a bit less full on than just telling the truth of their 'little shit-ness'

I am of the strong opinion that parents always need to know the full truth of how their children behave, engage, respond to others and what their attitude to learning is like but you have to tread carefully and the nuances can often be lost if either parents think the sun shines out if their child's backside or if they really just don't get what you're saying.

@overcovermultitasker Mine has 4(!!) Different behaviour management plans and her EHCP so effectively 48 pages on managing her.

Her teacher can still manage to find many positives about her for parent evening. And the academic side is crucial too which never crops up in all the behaviour merited

@overcovermultitasker

Ok I hadn't considered that parents evening was just for positives. So if your child is really bad, do the teachers just offer one positive and then that's the end of the meeting ?

😂😂😂 That would most definitely make my parent consultations shorter.

I teach secondary and if a child was persistently disruptive or rude, their parents would know before parents evening.

That having been said, I always aim to work with parents (and the child) to improve things. Often, small tweeks can make a massive difference. I taught a child last year who appeared to be rude, however, digging a little deeper I discovered that actually he had extremely low self esteem and believed he was 'thick' A bit of positive praise worked wonders.

Obviously, consequences may also be required and those are applied where necessary.

My son is a mix bag of things very sociable and kind hearted but just a pain in the arse at times. It got to a stage with nursery that all they would tell me was anything negative he'd done. He got a new nursery nurse who up ended the entire thing ignored the bad behaviour as much as possible and laid the praise on thick. He became a different child. Don't get me wrong can still be a challenge but generally cool.

My eldest was reported to be quiet and kind.
Obviously behaviour he saved for school as he was anything but at home.

I'll let you know tomorrow 🙄 it's ds4 first parents evening and he has admitted to us he is the loudest child in his class 🙈. He is quite honest about his day in school and has owned up to one occasion of being in time out. On the plus side i have heard that he is very good at tidying up.

As a teacher, I'd try to make sure that anything negative had already been flagged up beforehand and wasn't going to be a complete surprise at Parents Evening. I try to keep it mostly positive even where children are challenging - e.g. focussing on the progress they have made, while trying to make it clear that they are still not quite where I would expect. E.g. "at the beginning of the year little Johnny was finding it quite hard to listen to instructions. He's starting to follow simple instructions but we're still working on it." Some parents are better at interpreting that than others though.

My oldest two can be right little sods so I personally would welcome an honest and blunt teacher 😂
Too many "Not my precious baby" parents around nowadays though...

@MsAwesomeDragon

I'm known for being blunt at parents evening but even I would draw the line at calling any child a little shit 🤣

I tend to start with a positive, then factually describe the behaviour I see in every lesson, then end with something positive if I can think of another one. Unfortunately, it's well known that a lot of people remember the beginning and end of the conversation, so they don't remember the bulk of the meeting where I'm talking about bad behaviour. They leave glowing about the minor positive I said last (eg. He does turn up to detentions when I give them to him)

Ah, the good old shit sandwich.

A TA in DS1s Reception class called him 'a little firecracker' three weeks after he started. I confess that I laughed and said that she was being polite. He's 9 now. Still a(n) annoying little fuck badger firecracker.

Parent's evenings should not contain surprises about behaviour. If a child is a little horror you'd have known about it long before if they'd been in my class.
The biggest surprise I ever had on a parent's evening, as a teacher, was Fiona's mother (not real name). Fiona was a delight, bright, kind, polite, well mannered, arty, sporty the lot. Her mother basically disagreed with everything I said and slated the child. Staff room conversation revealed this was the case for the past 6 years. I felt so sad for Fiona.

In my DC's class, every single little shit has parents who think that they are the second coming. They would take 'spirited, direct etc' as positives and wouldn't want to acknowledge any negatives. Also always the first to complain to the school if their previous snowflakes are at all aggrieved.

A classroom wall chart. Brilliant to shame children 😡

My eldest's teacher said he was perfect and she couldn't think of anything he could improve on [insert smug emoticon here].

My youngest's teacher mostly moaned about him although she said he was good at maths.

It’s increasingly difficult to tell the truth on reports or at parents evenings. Looking at the threads on here when you can see that Dchild has behaved badly and the thread is full of outrage and accusations at the school and staff. These attitudes are increasingly prevalent In real life so to avoid a rumpus teachers just brush over.

I believe we are heading to a behaviour crisis with children because some parents ( usually of the poorest behaved children) are in denial about behaviour and schools are terrified of outraged, litigation happy parents. Poor behaviour is kept ‘ in house’ at school as far as possible, until the children are so far out of control that tearful parents march into school when the child is early to mid teens to demand support, and totally forget the denials, accusations that staff were lying, picking on their child etc etc a few years before. They certainly trot into my office around 3 times a year.

An excellent child and family behaviour education trainer said ‘ if you have a prince or princess in the classroom ( ie poorly behaved entitled child) then you are sure the King and Queen are at home’ . Teachers have enough to do without courting conflict, and possible wrath of SLT so keep quiet and skirt around the issues.

Words, terms to watch out for

Lively - irritating, cannot sit still
Regular contributions to class discussions - drowns out other children, constantly wants to speak
Navigating the challenges of group work - doesn’t get on with others, spoilt, no one wants to work with them
EasIly asserts his/ her opinions - could argue with themselves in a locked wardrobe, argumentative, forceful to the extent of offending others

I used to but now I just can't be arsed. It will go something like this

Me: 'Darling Ned has nice moments but he hasn't ever completed any homework, swears every second word, shot another student in the eye with a gun that you apparently gave him'

Parent: 'right so what did you do about this? Why isn't he getting A's?'

• towards a

The parents of the little shits never turn up to Parents Evening!

@ScarMatty

Of course we don't in that way!

We say things like

"Little Jonny does fantastic work in English but can often be sidetracked by other pupils in the class"
"Little Jonny loves to ask lots of questions" (doesn't stfu)
"Little Jonny needs to make his target for this term ensuring he creates the work we know he is capable of"

The problem is that the parents of these chuldren are either too ignorant or too delusional to read between the lines! I recall a father dashing around to try and see as many teachers as possible as the evening was coming to an end, he's been delayed unavoidably. When he came to me, about the only one left, I quickly told him that there was nothing wrong with his son that a good kick in the arse wouldn't cure! He beamed, that's the most honest thing I've heard all night!

Phoned a parent yesterday to tell her the child was being disruptive, rude, couldn’t care less about his peers being disrupted.I will be very honest with parents, results normally tally with poor behaviour. I’m not going to wait until Parents’ Evening to tell them either.

IME primary parents' eves are all a out finding something positive about every child and secondary are all about howazy the kids are. It could have been my kids of course but they both went from lovely, joy to teach, to lazy and lacking in effort over the summer at the end of yr6.

When I was in 5th year at high school(Scotland) my English teacher told my parents that I was 'the most disruptive girl she had ever taught' and I was rude and obnoxious. My parents couldn't believe what they were hearing as I was pretty much a teenage angel! So they called me over and the teacher had totally got me mixed up with another pupil! Not even in my class I might add. All year my marks had been really down on previous. My parents were fuming and complained, apparently we weren't the only ones and she suddenly retired a few weeks later, and my grades became much better.

@Feellikefrighteningyeah

A classroom wall chart. Brilliant to shame children 😡

Presumably their behaviour is worthy of shaming. Apologists do nothing to improve the situation, they simply refuse to accept sanctions, poor little kiddywink.

What’s a classroom wall chart for behaviour? Am I missing something...haven’t heard of this before. Is this actual putting children’s names in a red zone for “ bad” behaviour??

I'm a teacher.

If they're at little shit status (although I teach big shits 🤣) the parents will already be aware and parents evening is a good opportunity to reflect on the progress they may or may not have made. But all the teachers I know embrace this as positively as they can.

For non-shits we do focus on the positives and constructively mention where there may be areas to work on.

I do gush about the brilliant children, who make my job worth every moment, to their parents. But like you OP, with my own being in primary I'm always a little when every single child in the class has had a "glowing report". I've even heard of teachers allegedly crying because they're so impressed with a child. I suspect they probably just had hay fever 🙊