Secondary school parents' evening

[TheLovelinessOfDemons]

How do you choose which teachers to see?

You're lucky, and I can see why you would want to encourage trying hard in things that didn't come naturally.
Both my DDs qualified for extra time in exams due to slow processing and motor skills.
What people often don't realise is that those issues also means that they need more time for homework and more time to revise things. It isn't something that just arrives the moment they set foot in the exam hall.
So non-core subjects that they didn't enjoy were definitely a 'do the minimum'.

@TeenMinusTests

You're lucky, and I can see why you would want to encourage trying hard in things that didn't come naturally. Both my DDs qualified for extra time in exams due to slow processing and motor skills. What people often don't realise is that those issues also means that they need more time for homework and more time to revise things. It isn't something that just arrives the moment they set foot in the exam hall. So non-core subjects that they didn't enjoy were definitely a 'do the minimum'.

Yes, that makes perfect sense. Makes me wonder whether some students would benefit from a significantly reduced curriculum so that they could focus more on the subjects that they really need. On the other hand, some kids who aren't particularly academic might have exceptional talents in art, music or other areas, so I guess the curriculum needs to be broad enough to enable them to discover those talents, at least in the earlier years.

I do appreciate that we are very lucky not to have to worry about the academic stuff with dd.

We've always had to book appointments, but before the online system came in (which we used for face to face evenings for a couple of years prior to converting to virtual meetings) the booking system involved DS or DD having a scrappy bit of paper listing all their subjects that they and all their classmates had to get each subject teacher to mark a 5 minute slot. Obviously if their form was the last to have a subject teacher the week the forms were issued, there were no slots left. Equally if they had a crap form tutor who forgot to issue the booking form, there were no slots left. And the chances of me ever getting to see a fully completed booking sheet were fairly slim!

Seeline That's a bit rubbish.
Our school:
a) had booking form in the planner as standard
b) where a teacher had e.g. 3 classes they shared out slots equally between the classes
c) they actively asked to see some parents - e.g. 'Tim give me your planner so I can write an appointment in'

Actually thinking about it, in KS3 the DC did some subjects on rotation so they only studied them for a term. We didn't bother with quite a few of the teachers for those.
In fact, memorably, when we went to see DD's computer science teacher after he'd taught her for a term he clearly didn't have a clue who she was. He asked her name twice and then basically showed us her marks on a slip of paper and said they were quite good. That was it! [DD did not go on to study Computer Science GCSE]

@UserTwice

Actually thinking about it, in KS3 the DC did some subjects on rotation so they only studied them for a term. We didn't bother with quite a few of the teachers for those. In fact, memorably, when we went to see DD's computer science teacher after he'd taught her for a term he clearly didn't have a clue who she was. He asked her name twice and then basically showed us her marks on a slip of paper and said they were quite good. That was it! [DD did not go on to study Computer Science GCSE]

I remember dd's year 7 computer science teacher desperately trying to work out who she was!

We always used to see them all but it was a massive PITA; a lot of them sat around the hall, which was a bit easier, but if you had to go to and fro to find them in random rooms it took bloody ages.
I always thought you should only have to see the ones who particularly wanted to talk to you, and the ones you really wanted to talk to. If the child is chugging along with no issues either side then there’s no need.
When you have more than one child at the same school, and 2 parents evenings per year, the agony expands

In years 7 and 8 we never went to see all subject teachers. It would have taken all night. We prioritised all core subjects like English, science, maths, history and foreign languages. We also saw the art teacher as DD3 wanted to take it to GCSE.

Once all GCSE options were sorted out and they had begun the courses (they chose options in year 8 here and begin the courses in year 9) then I did go to see them all as there was a reason to and there weren't so many to get around.

Years 12 and 13 was even easier as only a handful of staff to see.

Oh, and the appointments never ran to time after the first two or three. There was always slippage an they often overran.

Saw all of them. Much easier to do if your school is running an online system. All done in an hour!

We could see 9, so I picked the compulsory subjects and the ones dd thought she might want to continue. By GCSE it was all of them as she did 10 GCSEs but English was 2 subjects. Op hasn't said how many she's allowed to see though

If it's just a case of the appointments all booking up very quickly, then the strategy is to find out from your child which teachers have more than one group in their year group. For ours, the music/drama/art teachers taught nearly every class, so we knew that if we wanted to see them, we'd need to book those first. For maths/English/science, it's likely that the teacher will only have one group, so there should be enough slots to go round.