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.

What did you do with your younger children when attending in person parents evenings-surely they still needed to be kept quiet then?

Or did you get a babysitter? Perhaps you should do that for virtual ones too.

This completely.

i appreciate it’s stressful OP but also you cannot begrudge a parent wanting more than a meagre five minutes with their child’s teacher.

it’s a ridiculously short amount of time. DD’s are online and like you say the session ends at five minutes. The teacher spent the first minute talking about her baby, the next two telling us about DD’s recent friendship spat, another minute that DD is very kind and then tried to cram her entire academic performance into the remaining 30-40 seconds. It was ridiculous and we requested another meeting because we have expressed a number of concerns about her post covid progress.

Five minutes is NOT enough nor is a single day to discuss the progress of 30+ students.

There used to be a poster on the TES forum who posted nonsense like this. It was exactly the same style and content, designed to aggravate and get a reaction!

I had it from 4-8 on Valentine’s Day this year and my birthday last year. They always pick good times!

I quite enjoy parent’s evening and then just crash after.

I was gutted they came back into real life. I voted for online ones, particularly because the times are kept and there is no chaos!

@Tolson is on a wind up. It’s funny.

I love the online parents evenings. 5 minutes is plenty for a quick check in to make sure they're generally on track/behaving. If I wanted to talk about any major concerns I'd email or arrange a private chat.

I've just had my first return to face to face meeting as a parent. I could see the teachers' 'dinner' of crackers and some packets of cheese on his desk clearly untouched at nearly 7pm.

Lols at the outrage that a friend adult hasn’t had dinner by 7pm 😬

Maybe they were doing what many people do every single day? Having a quick snack and planning on having dinner later?

Friend adult? Grown adult!

my son's are grown up thank my lucky star's🌟 I don't deal with schools and teachers anymore best day of life when my youngest left school it was over they both walked out at 14 dread to think what schools are like now

I have some sympathy in that I'm sure they are exhasting and some parents are horrible.

However, these parents are trusting you to teach their children what they need to know. They're trusting their children's development to you - for myself, there's nothing on earth more important than that. I don't think a five minute online slot is adequate for discussion.

I’m not surprised you dread it OP, but I am so relieved to have face to face parents evening back. I hated talking over a screen and having one eye on the ticking clock, knowing you were about to be cut off. Half the time I didn’t even get to say goodbye!

I also agree that 5 minutes does make a bit of a mockery of the whole thing. It’s not long enough to find out how well your child is doing in a subject and certainly not enough to discuss improvements etc. At my last parents evening they had virtually nothing to say to me. That wouldn’t be acceptable in any other meeting.

Also, are that many parents really so demanding? At my parents evening it all seemed very amicable.

I generally have little sympathy with poster who say they are going to get flamed and then post something very vanilla like this. It's not scandalous to not want to do 3 intensive hours after the end of the your day. But surely this is part of the problem? You need a bit more backbone. How are you going to be helpful to parents if you are worried about this?

If you can’t justify every detention then don’t give them out.

I'm so glad of online parents evening. They're on time! When it was face to face some parents went over their 5 minutes and pushed everyone else back. I'm glad for online and those kind of parents can be cut off after their 5 minutes. We don't all have the whole evening to spare!

It is completely fine to dread part of your job where you’d normally spend 3.30-7 planning/marking but now have to do meetings, and then the planning/marking afterwards! That is not unreasonable.

Seeing that these could be done virtually so much easier over lockdown seems that some heads are making a deliberately backwards step as well. My DC’s school asked the parents what they preferred and nearly all opted for online to continue-it’s brilliant, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t prefer it.

I'm baffled by the 5 mins isn't long enough at secondary. What else are you talking about? I'm usually done in 3.

Not the point.

To raise objections about detentions in the parents' evening is a time waster, not for this occasion which is about pupil progress. Such matters should be done via phone call/email/separate meeting.

The online evenings have been a godsend as a teacher - I get to see more parents than face-to-face as the cut-off means you don’t have the parent who drones on and on with a queue building up.

Personally, I think we as teachers should decide which parents NEED to come in, as it’s always the ones you really need to speak to that don’t bother.

Pumper, occasionally teachers and children disagree about whether a detention was justified or not!

We did this at my last school, ticking the online booking system for parents/pupils we needed to see while others were"welcome". This way the parents saw it, as did the HOYs.

It made very little difference to the "wanted" ones, who invariably didn't sign up. They always had to be followed up, but then they mostly needed more than the 5 minutes anyway.

The one good thing to come out of lockdown is remote Parents’ Evenings. Even better when I can get home first. Much more efficient and less stressful Our appointments are automatic now and it cuts out after 5 minutes!

As a teacher and a parent like many on here I can see the issue from both sides but really, for many kids, especially at secondary, the majority are doing fine and don't need any more time, if that. If they do, emails or a separate meeting may well have already been organised, or should be. If we didn't have to spend 50x5 mins saying "they're fine" to the 90% who are, we could spend more time on those with actual problems. Fundamentally though, the overall issue is too few teachers and too many kids / classes per teacher. I teach in a private school so 2x written reports, 6x grades and a PE per child each year isn't as onerous because overall I teach far fewer kids. As with a lot of issues in education, funding to address teacher recruitment and retention is at the heart of this.

I used to teach around 200 children when I was a secondary school teacher. Apart from my form group, I barely knew the Yr7, 8 and 9s. 5mins was ample to say what I had to say. Longer would have been difficult as 15mins each would take 50hrs of parents evening. It would also take me, as a parent, about 4hrs to see all my daughter’s teachers for 15mins each. I did know my GCSE and A level students very well and found meeting their parents very worthwhile. But I don’t think people realise quite how many children some teachers see and how little classroom time they actually spend with them. 1hr a week with a class of 30 doesn’t give you much time to get to know each child very well. Mine used to rotate groups in KS3 which meant I only saw them for 8 lessons and parents evening was often at the beginning of the block of 8 lessons.