The Sub Life

9/11/08
Parent Night

Having settled into the job my first couple of weeks, I soon faced yet another in the many line of "firsts" that have come my way this fall as a teacher: Parent Night. The strange thing with teachers is that, due to the nature of our work, unlike most people we actually prefer facing a room full of children to a room full of adults. A room full of adults is actually more stressful for us, not less. So there is a certain amount of anxiety that comes with preparing for parent night. When you factor in that this is a school known for a very high level of parent involvement (i.e. I knew the room would be packed) and that fellow staff members kept asking me if I was nervous about parent night - thus making me more nervous about parent night - there were definitely more butterflies than normal.

Some of my readers may have experienced parent night as either a parent or as a teacher, but for me this was uncharted territory. I attended one in 2005 as a student teacher in North Carolina, but the classroom teacher Heather did all the preparation and the talking as I was still an education student at that point. Other than some help with the setup, my role was strictly as observer. Not this time. In tandem with Fran, the 5/6 math and science teacher, I was going to have to do more than just watch. I knew up front that we would do the presentation together in Fran's room and that I would only be talking about the language arts and social studies curriculum, so that definitely put me at ease at least somewhat. Plus, I had already met many of the parents the first couple of weeks of school, so this was not a group of strangers.

I got to school a little early and took part in some of the games the PE teacher had setup for the parents. Played some floor hockey with a soccer ball instead of a puck and a long foam stick in place of an actual hockey stick, thus making it very hard to make the ball go anywhere fast. I basically just ran around a lot and occasionally touched the ball when it emerged from a scrum of parents. Was kind of fun to take the edge off a bit, though. We all headed over to the room and then the fun began. Fran opened the proceedings with a discussion of the weekly schedule, and at the mention of word study turned it over to me for a brief explanation of what we did in word study. Once the ball was rolling with word study, I proceeded to rattle off my entire language arts presentation before turning it back over to Fran. Not exactly the way we drew it up, but whatcha gonna do? Fran kind of laughed as I turned it back over to him and I grinned sheepishly.

I must say that during both the language arts and social studies presentations I was very relaxed, despite the fact that there was like 75 parents in the room at the time. Was kind of hard to gauge the parents' level of satisfaction when the night was over, as they are not going to come right out and be like "You nailed it" or "You really crapped the bed tonight" or hold up scores like Olympic judges. However, Friday morning the curriculum director of the school, who is also the parent of a child in my class, said that the parents were very happy with what they heard and satisfied as they left the room that night. So, it appears as if my first parent night was a success. And the best part is that I don't have to do another one for a year. Whoo hoo!