Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Parent conferences only for c and below

:thud:

Education is a three-way effort between all players involved: parent, child and teacher. Someone needs to educate this individual on the concept of being a team player.

I think it's terrible that a teacher would discourage any parent from meeting with them for any reason. Especially because teachers and administrators are constantly saying that they want parents to be involved, that it takes everyone participating to successfully educate a child, that not enough parents are interested enough and involved enough in their child's education. Aargh! I'm furious on your behalf!

In our school district, we only get one 15 minute parent-teacher conference per year, right about now. You only get the one in the spring if your child is below grade level. I always insist that we meet anyway with my older boy, who is hearing-impaired.
I do sympathize with the teachers since we have like 33 kids in the class and it's a huge time commitment for them to prepare and sit through the conferences. Our school gets out at 1:30 pm (instead of 2:30 pm) daily for one week during the conference time.

in this situation, I would insist on the conference too

... but just wondering, in this day and age, why does anyone even want a conference in person when email seems so much more convenient? When I used to go to my stepson's conferences (he just graduated high school earlier this year), I always felt like I'm "not equal" ... I'm just there to let it all fall on me and the teachers didn't really listen what I had to say anyways. Then when emails became more common I felt more on level with them and actually got a lot accomplished too! AND had a paper trail!

DS4 just started public preschool two weeks ago and their conferences are on Monday. And while he's 2E and I'm sure the teacher and I would have a lot to talk about, I told her I am not going to waste her time since she already let me know by email (when I asked) that he has adjusted really well and there are no issues at the moment. I just asked her to let me know ASAP should anything arise. One or two conferences a year just seem so insufficient!

Although I agree you can get alot done by email, I think it's good to also meet the teacher face to face. Something about the human contact that is different from email. They can also show you their written work while talking to you, which you can't do as easily via email.

I always used to meet the teachers at the beginning of the year during the back to school night. I just never found the parent conferences too productive, especially given the number of parents each teacher had to see on those days. I was just one of many.

As for written work, I was never shown any other than what he brought home from school, so that wouldn't even occur to me as something to ask for during the conferences? hmmm, something to keep in mind for when my two little monkeys are older!

We just had ours yesterday. So frustrating... we had to break up a an actual productive conversation with the SW and spec ed teacher about appropriate differentiation and accommodations so we could all walk down the hall for our 15 minute "conference" with the teacher. She doesn't get it - any of it. Not the giftedness. Not the disabilities. Not the anxiety. Not the big, cheerful, outgoing personality. None of it. I heard how slow DD is to put her things away in the morning. (Yeah, she's dyspraxic - she does everything slowly.) I heard about how amazingly insightful her comments were during a recent discussion about a book. (Uh, yeah, she's gifted that way - remember?) I heard about her "adjusting nicely to second grade" and "feeling comfortable now speaking up which she never was before." (Yeah - right. My unbelievably extroverted child who was just telling us last weekend how relieved she is that the awful public shaming system was *finally* removed from her classroom. "It was awful" and "I was nervous ALL the time". Glad she is feeling SOOOO comfortable in your classroom that you have finally broken down her wall so she can be comfortable contributing to your "discussions".) All we heard about was how DD was doing according to typical second grade standards. Unfortunately n-o-t-h-i-n-g about DD is "typical" for a second grader.

Total. Waste. Of. Time. Ugghhh...

Maybe this above a "C" standard would sound different to parents of more typical kids. In a situation as complicated as ours a 15 minute summary of totally useless information was pretty pointless. It just highlighted how tough a road we have ahead of us.

Because it isn't.
If I email my child's teacher for clarification, and then have further questions based on what her answer is, email could take days. A conversation could take minutes. We've had a recent situation that was cleared up, mostly, with two phone calls. Had it been left to email, it would have taken forever, and escalated exponentially. I'm very glad not to have had that happen.

This happened to us this year with DD8. Her teacher emailed saying that DD's behavior and grades gave her no cause for concern and she did not see the need for a conference. I read it as "I don't want to meet with you and will be annoyed if you insist" and caved. In retrospect, I really wish I hadn't. The especially weird thing about this is that in fact, we aren't getting the message that her behavior is all that great, though grades are very good.

Email is great when you need to hold people accountable. It's also great when you need to make an argument, because it allows you to get all your points across before anyone makes a counterargument, because face-to-face, it's easy for things to go wrong when the other side locks in on one point, and either ignores the others, or you never even get the chance to bring them up. And, it's great for brief communications.

For anything outside of that, human conversation is far more effective. In particular, email is a creativity killer, because it inhibits that organic flow that conversations have.
Also, text comments have a way of being interpreted with a lot more negativity, because they lack the vocal and body signals that clue in the audience to intent. This is part of why flaming is so common.