Meet the Teacher - negative parents

[sunnysarah6]

There was a meet the teacher meeting for our Y2 class after school. A chance for us to meet the new teacher, learn about the year head and expectations etc.

So basically a group of 4 mums had clearly got together before hand to use this meeting as a platform to complain and they took over and moaned about the last year's teacher, forcefully question the new teachers credentials and basically turned the whole thing into a negative experience and used it as a forum to criticise. It was embarrassing.

Everyone came out looking quite miserable. In reality there isn't really anything major to complain about, and I think these parents need a hobbie, but it does spread negativity. They really got on my nerves.

Just wondering if this type of things happen in other schools? I'm new to a lot of this with it being my first born and I'm a working Mum who can't always attend things like this.

That's very unfortunate. How did the teacher respond?

We had a 'meet the staff' thing tonight too. Unfortunately there were a few parents who wanted to argue over specific things, and erm though the issues are something for management, they still wanted to shout at us.

Strong pinch of salt and a gin

Perhaps parents should be sent to the Head for little chat!!

Poor teacher- I hope she'd experienced, that sort of thing could really rock a new recruit.

Even as a senior teacher, if something I was hosting started to go that way I would be asking the Head to step into the room to support me. Was the Head around?

I'd let the teacher know you are not in agreement with the other mums. I would just pop in and say (without naming names) that you felt there was a negative feel about the meeting, that your dd/DS is happy (or not as the case may be) and looking forward to the year ahead and leave it at that.

Moaning about the previous teacher to the current one is a ridiculous thing to do, it's not as if they are going to lay in to their own colleague and agree with the parents. We've had a similar situation at my dc's school, where a group of parents hated ds's teacher. There was a lot of grumbling and winding each other up, I like the mums involved so tried to change the topic when it came up and let the teacher know at parents evening that we were happy with how things were going,

That teacher is probably feeling pretty apprehensive about the year to come with a start like that

I agree with OhVeryFunny, popping in to say that your DS is happy and you don't agree with the comments is a good thing to do.

I have one child in Y1 so limited experience but I haven't come across that type of problem to date. DSs reception teacher was excellent, his Y1 teacher seems pretty good & nice so far. If I did have a problem I wouldn't tackle it the way that those parents did, it was very unprofessional of them but more to the point, if I wanted something resolved, its unlikely to happen going about it that way.

PS I'm not a teacher.