It was past 9 o’clock at night, and in the first-grade classroom, 30 or so adults sat shifting awkwardly on chairs far too small for their bottoms. Those eyes that were not glazed were exchanging looks of desperation.
Up front, a pretty young teacher was waiting for a tirade to finish.
“… And you are sending books home with the children,” continued the tirade-deliverer, a mother whose unashamedly aggressive promotion of her children made her an object of open derision and secret envy.
“Sometimes you send home books of poetry.”
The teacher nodded. This was so.
“But my child doesn’t like poetry.”
“Well, we believe children should be exposed to many different types of –”
“Why should my child have to read poetry when he doesn’t like it? Are you trying to put him off reading?”
The teacher laughed uncertainly. A murmur ran through the crouched ranks of the other parents and, finally, a rebel demanded, “Oh, can we please move on?”
“Good idea!” said the teacher brightly, at last taking control of her classroom.
That incident took place several years ago, but still it ranks for me as the single most awful (and, in retrospect, hilarious) example of the way one fanatical parent can hijack an entire back-to-school night.
This annual evening, like car seats and hand sanitizer, has become an inescapable part of modern child-rearing. One evening every September — and more than one, if your family attends several schools — you must traipse back to the same building from which you retrieved your children only hours before.
Into the auditorium and classrooms you go, to hear what the principal and teachers have planned for your little rascals. The idea is to inculcate a sense of shared commitment between parents and teachers.
Unfortunately, no matter how much you love your children, no matter how interested you are in what they’re learning and who’s educating them — no matter, even, how much you esteem the school and the people who staff it, back-to-school night is a total drag.
There’s just no getting around it. Oh, some schools jazz things up by laying out children’s artwork and essays. That’s nice, but you’ve still lost the evening. Some schools hold out the enticement of wine-and-cheese receptions after all the teachers have made their presentations. That’s nice, too, but by the time the corks pop it’s almost 11 and in eight hours everyone’s got to be headed back here again.
Maybe the real problem is that back-to-school night is an unsettling reminder of one’s own school days. Squatting on a first-grader’s chair, or squeezing into an eighth-grader’s desk in a row of desks facing forward, can summon up old anxieties.
You may be an adult; you may employ minions who fear you; you may run a busy household. But in the schoolroom’s stern fluorescent glare, you are thrown back in time. You may be longing to leave, but you have to wait for the teacher to finish before you may be dismissed.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
