Parent-teacher meeting for twins

[temporary]

Bit of a rant here.....

I had a disappointing experience at the parent meeting. Mine are in the same class, both girls.

I put my name down for two back to back 10 minute slots to discuss them.

Despite the fact that I went with a clear agenda of discussing them one at a time, I somehow could not keep the teacher on track and it turned into a discussion of their relative abilities. I wanted to have 10 minutes on DT1 then 10 minutes on T2, and I tried to say that clearly at first, but somehow got cut off, and the teacher ran on discussing DT1 and DT2 in comparative terms. She also went into talking about twins in the year above, and comparing with them.

I now wonder if I should have put our name down for one meeting on one day for one DT, and another meeting on another day for the other DT.

I want them to be seen as the individuals that they are, and I want to be able to focus on each one at a time, not have them lumped in together. Nor do I want any discussion of twin-dom and how interesting twins are....I want to hear about how my two individual daughters are doing in class, and how we can help them to do their best! Just as a singleton child would be getting.

I write this as a warning to parents of other young multiples.

hmm i am not a parent of twins, but if i was that would have pissed me right off!!

it might be worth a quick chat with teacher to re-iterate this!

That is terrible and rather unprofessional of the teacher. I would be livid.

that is bad
how old are they, is there any chance of seperate classes? Mine were split in Y4, it worked well

That is really bad and very unprofessional.

I have twins who are in the same class and always have appointments back to back. We always discuss one child for 10 minutes and then the other.

I was livid when my DS was in primary one I was told he was immature compared to some of the other boys in the class, he was the second youngest in the class!!

This would have annoyed me too. The fact that they are twins should not have come into the equation.

I had a similar experience last year and because their school report cards were very similar too, we thought (rightly, i think), that they didn't know who was who (my boys are id). This was one of the reasons why we have put them in different classes this school year. Much easier for the teachers like that and now I'm sure we are talking about T1 or T2 during parent-teacher conferences. However, I don't know if that would be possible (or even desirable) for you.

I have twins in the same class. We also get consecutive appointments and largely discuss one then the other. There is the odd thing where the teacher might cover both at once (eg summary of what the class have been doing), and to my mind that is fine and in fact gives us a bit longer to discuss more specific stuff. I dont mind if the teacher makes the odd comparative commnet so long as they are largely discussed separately. And we will sometimes ask the odd comparative question. For example, I can see that DTD1 has much neater handwriting than her sister. What i am not entirely sure about is whether DTD1 is just particularly good at handwriting and DTD2 average for her age, or whether DTD2's handwriting is of concern. I would like to think that if DTD2's handwriting was a concern, this would be flagged anyway but sometimes I find the response is a bit more specific if I ask a comparative question.

It's really frustrating, and we've had this problem right up until sixth form where they had the same teachers.

Could you try having different appointments, perhaps with another parent/child going in between your two? Once I was given back to back appointments automatically, but asked another mum to swap so that we had a gap.

You may find you need to keep reminding them that you want to discuss them individually as they just don't seem to get it!

Do they appear to treat your DDs as individuals in other ways? Are they put in different small groups for activities, do they give them each notes to take home (and do you always return them separately, even if it means writing two cheques?), do all the staff know which is which? (ours aren't identical but some staff just couldn't seem to remember which was which). I found that the more you treated them as individuals the more the teachers understood that this is what we wanted, although you may just be unlucky with the teachers at your school. I think TAMBA used to publish some guidelines, perhaps they still do?

I once heard them referred to as "the twins" rather than by their names, so I asked the teacher how often they referred to the other children as "the singleton". That seemed to put a stop to it

They are only little (4), so I guess it has just been a learning experience that is not at too important a time.

We are working towards getting their confidence up so that next year they will be separated and then this problem will be solved.

Gosh...."the twins"...I would hate that.