To be dreading face to face parents evening Thursday

[IHateParentsEvenings]

Going to get flamed to a crisp, never mind.

I am dreading it … teaching all day and then three solid hours between 4 and 7 talking to parents, some will be lovely but there will be some really difficult ones, won’t be able to be cut off after five minutes, will enjoy making me justify every detention since September.

Then home exhausted and still got the next days planning to do …

sorry MN, I dread it.

No flaming from me. Parents Evenings are a logistical nightmare and I'm sure teachers find them exhausting.

Let's hope the majority of parents are appreciative. If any are not, a good trick is to imagine they are sitting on the toilet, pants round their knees. It makes them seem far less important than they think they are.

Yanbu. The parents at our school voted to keep it online fortunately

Persuade your school to adopt online parents evenings - they'll be cut off after 5 minutes whether they like it or not!

YANBU. Parents' evening is exhausting and can be really stressful. Fortunately I only have to do it from the parent side of the table/screen these days.

Yanbu. Parents are often the most difficult part of the job imo.

Online parents evening, especially for secondary was far easier for everyone! I don't know why we have gone back to the old random chaos.

My teacher friends loved virtual parents evening due to protection from abuse.

@Tolson Is that a joke? Imagine coming on to here to boast to everyone that your husband is a colossal bell-end.

Holy moly @Tolson there is no way I’d want to work at your DH’s school. It’s those kind of heads that create over-entitled parents and kids and overworked and over-stressed teachers

Why do schools shove 30 meetings into a single evening. How can those meetings be of any real value to parents or teachers at 5 minutes per child? Whole concept smacks of box ticking. Having "parent week" with max of 5 meetings per day and a pre-selected option of online or in-person would put a bit of sincerity behind the whole thing. My last parent-teacher meeting consisted of 3 sentences from the teacher followed by "any concerns? no, great - bye!" - spent more time getting ready and traveling to it - it's all so silly!

Please do let us know where this school is so that we can all AVOID it like the plague.
TIA.

😂😂😂

I 'totally disagree' with you Tolson. Endless flexibilty towards parents is not in the job description and frankly forcing that sort of ethos on teachers is likely to contribute to work-related stress.

I'm not going to flame you @IHateParentsEvenings . Face-to-face parents' evenings are chaotic and I've witnessed unruly parents kicking off and would not want to deal with that after a day's teaching with plan to do after!@

Hate the new system anyway. 5 minutes is a tick box and half of the teachers were fully booked anyway so I have no idea how he’s getting on his half his subjects.

it was 5 mins though you absolutely were cut off after that point.

So ‘his’ staff are expected to be on call 24/7?
Is he available to take calls from parents and staff at all hours? 12.30am any good?

@Tolson

whats the staff turnover at his school like. Just out of interest.

How long would you propose the 5 meetings 5 times a week be for?
5 min or however long the parent wants to talk? How would the appointment times for that work then?

I’m so annoyed by this thread I’ve forgotten how to construct a sentence…

As a teacher, do you see any value in 5 min meeting per child? If it is not the case of 'little Johnny is top of the class' what do you actually manage to fit in 5 min?

OP, surely you have teachers forums where you can bore people with how much you dislike parents and how worthless their input is, rather than a parents forum?

Not sure what you’re trying to achieve, but in any other walk of life if a meeting you’re running about the work you’re doing doesn’t go well then typically that’s your responsibility.

The best teachers meetings I’ve seen are where there are no surprises because there is a good ongoing dialogue between teacher, student and parent all the time in whatever form that might take. If there are surprises that come up then you need to look at how you’re preparing for the meetings and communicating throughout the year.

Without parents teachers would not have jobs.

😂