Eliot Waxman, with whom I teach Senior Seminar, greeted the parents of our students with a smile. “I know how you feel,” he added. “I just went to my first back-to-school night for my son in kindergarten.” There was a chorus of “Awwwws.” A parent piped up, “But the desks were smaller, right?” We all laughed as Eliot conceded, “I didn’t even try to sit in a desk. I stood.”
And so Eliot and I conducted his sixth and my 22nd back-to-school night. I remember attending them as a parent with the same weird, double vision that Eliot observed as he saw what it was like from the other side. Being a parent has taught us both to understand what teachers need to convey on this important night.
When a parent comes up to one of us and comments, “I would love to take this class!” Eliot and I know we’ve successfully conveyed the philosophy behind the course, and the excitement we feel each year as we develop new connections between our disciplines.
Eliot and I have figured out, as parents and teachers, that the anxiety of leaving your child in the hands of an all-powerful school functionary is only dissipated by the confidence that your child is in a positive environment.
No matter what anyone says about the curriculum or the rules or the special activities, parents come to back-to-school night essentially hoping that the spirit of the place will enable their child to thrive.
Once I figured that out, I realized it was never necessary to tell parents everything about what we will read during the year or the days of the week I will be available for after school help. All that is in the syllabus, posted on the Web.
What a parent wants and needs from those few minutes in their child’s classrooms in a sense of the humanity of the person standing in the front. Will the teacher have the kind of voice Charlie will listen to? Will the teacher notice when the class is tuning out or falling asleep? Is the teacher more stuck on a particular agenda, or aware that adjustments might have to be made to accommodate learning styles and attention spans?
Basically, parents want their 10 minutes before each high school teacher, or one hour before the elementary school teacher, to breeze by. They don’t want to be looking at the clock, wondering how soon this will be over. They dread Charlie Brown’s “Waa waa waa waa” teacher caricature.
So what parents demand of teachers is simultaneously quite modest and utterly daunting. They welcome different approaches. They almost never have a fixed idea of how the classroom should be run. That’s the modest part.
But they want teachers to have a spark and love for what they’re doing. Most of all, they want teachers to see the special gifts each child has. That is the daunting part — and it’s the only part that counts.
Erica Jacobs teaches at Oakton High School and George Mason University. E-mail her at [email protected].
