The Sub Life

10/24/08

Conference Week

Before I entered the teaching field, the words "conference week" were associated with that glorious time on ESPN in March when college basketball entered conference tournament time in advance of the NCAA's. A glorious week for me the college basketball fan, filled with much TV watching and little work. However, as any teacher can attest to, school conference week is far from a glorious time and is a week filled with little TV watching and much work. Such was the reality I faced this past week as I hunkered down for my first conference experience as a teacher.

As I remember it from my youth in the fine public schools of West Hartford, CT, a parental invitation to talk with the teacher in person was usually preceeded by a phone call home to deliver news such as "Your son threw _________ out the window of the bus" or "Grant shot a spitball at ________" or "You'll never guess who started a food fight in the cafeteria today." As a parent you usually were not expecting good news at the conferences, and thus there was a built in air of tension and negativity to the proceedings before they even started. And yes, for those of you that are wondering, I did actually get in trouble a lot in elementary school. The behavior epiphany finally came in 7th grade, much to the relief of my parents and area law enforcement.

The nice thing about the conferences at SCCLC is that every child has one regardless of whether they are doing very well, very poorly or anything in between. On the plus side, this philosophy makes for generally pleasant conversations where we talk about areas of strength and areas that need improvement. If a child was not turning in homework and the parent was not aware of it - as was the case with many of my kids - then they were aware of it after this meeting. I do not think it was a coincidence that the week after conferences, both the collective spelling test scores and the homework turn-in rate jumped substantially. I have said it many times, but increased parental involvement = increased student success.

On the minus side, the SCCLC conference philosophy means that, as a teacher, I have to do 56 individual conferences in the span of 4 days in addition to all of my planning and instructional responsibilities. Throw in the fact that our Powergrade online gradebook system was not functional until the weekend before conferences and you have one stressed out new teacher. However, as with most challenges I have faced this fall it went much better than my doom and gloom prognostications would have suggested. And just like parent night, the best part is that we only do conferences once a year so I won't have to face hell week again until fall 2009. Whoo hoo!