I don't know how a back to school night should be done. I grew up in a very, very small town and it was more like a potluck among friends. Littleton High School is a different story. Last week the school cafeteria was filled with as many people as it has square feet. It was hard for me to fathom how one might organize this. The room had turned into something like the stock exchange of our children's future. Waves of enthusiastic parents using outside voices on teachers or anyone that looked like one. It seemed like there was room for improvement.
I didn't think last year was terrible. We went from classroom to classroom, met the teacher and had some q&a. It was kind of fun. I felt like a freshman with a wild pituitary rumbling around the hallways trying to find the room. The parents we met along the way giggled at the throwback terror of getting to class on time, yet we were eager to be informed.
This year was different. I guess we thought there would be more structure because there's a new principal. I've never met this man. But he's come in hot. There are some new rules and the kids are upset. As I've explained to them, imagine how big that job is and how you've got to Kool-aid Man into the room with some big boss energy. If you come in all loose and easy, you might as well just go lie down on the railroad tracks. My kids have painted in my head those 80s movies with bad schools getting turned around by the likes of Edward James Olmos, or that one where Morgan Freeman is yelling for two hours. I'm hoping Michelle Pfeiffer shows up to teach.
We didn't get to see him. Although, with a broken megaphone, one brave faculty member stood above the throngs to announce that the new principal would be speaking and we should go see him. Sorry, that's not gonna happen. My wife and I and every other parent we talked to found ourselves in something like a terrible reality show where we were running from person to person, hoping they might be the teacher on our child's schedule. And instead of these teachers getting to address a room full of twenty people at a time, they had to confer individually with every parent in the room. Usually right after you teetered towards offender status by intensely scanning their torso for some kind of name-tag identity.
My Humble Suggestion #1:
Big name tags and placard signs. Any kind of glaring identification would be great. I don't know how many teachers I peppered with super intellectual questions like, "Are you a teacher?"
This blog post isn't a complaint. It's an observation with some shots at how to improve the situation. And, honestly, we were just a keg away from what we might have done many years ago. In the waning days of a hot summer all we were missing were red solo cups, which would have been handy to celebrate our advancements in educator stalking.
After about two hours of yelling, my wife's notebook had a list of names and a slowly advancing number of check marks.
We did get one hint about where our middle boy's language arts teacher would be. "She's selling t-shirts,” someone said. "Oh we saw people selling t-shirts!" we announced confidently. Turns out it was the booster club and they were really hoping we'd buy some memorabilia and stop asking if any of them knew our son. Yet with no purchase necessary, one of the boosters offered that the teacher might be selling t-shirts outside. The outdoors offered more teachers but they'd already rotated the language arts teacher somewhere else. In her stead were two other teachers we'd already interrogated.
I made eye contact with one and she was very much OH GAWD. Like a waitress who's had enough of the belligerent man at table six. She averted her gaze with hopes I'd cease hacking at her resolve with more queries about her colleagues. I understood.
My Humble Suggestion #2:
Last year we really liked how each teacher was in their classroom and we'd get to see them in their natural environs. But the other night at least one teacher we shouted at said that, while that worked for the parents, some teachers were staying late with ever-shrinking numbers of people in their classes. Compared to yelling at zombie hordes of breeding couples, I'm not sure how that's worse. So here's an idea. And it may be a terrible one, but if I'm going to complain I'd better have some constructive feedback. How about this:
You have people sign up for classroom slots. There's, say, four classroom slots from 530 to 730. Not everyone gets in.
No bigs.
Because you broadcast one of classroom slots via zoom or whatever so people can tune in to watch.
Students can moderate the online sessions with the power to mute everyone and unmute only those who politely raise their digital hand.
You also record those sessions so people can tune in whenever they'd like.
Maybe that's a terrible idea. Just spitballing here.
We'd run into the same parents several times. My understanding is a labyrinth isn't actually a maze, as a labyrinth takes you to one place no matter what. A maze has all kinds of options that will have you boinking into walls like that one kid who doesn't fully understand PE. This was a maze. Maybe a labyrinthine maze? Because the same route we kept taking also kept getting us back to the same place: the cafeteria of despair. In front of our city's most learned, we kept redefining ourselves as insane by going back to the same places to not find the people we had already not discovered.
We saw one woman shuffling as if she had just wandered off the set of One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. "I don't even know why I'm here," mumbled out of the side of her face. I'd just been deservedly admonished by one teacher for asking her if she was a teacher when she was talking to someone else asking her the same thing. There were people projecting in all directions. My wife was a little concerned that she'd intimated to a teacher that wanting to be a teacher meant you were crazy. And I don't think she should be concerned about that kind of comment. We grew up in teacher families. My mom was badgered by the emotionally incapable of our community until her early death and my mother in law has been hardened into immortality.
Meanwhile, two sets of parents we'd seen at least five times joined us in our effort to get the entire list. This back-to-school intelligence test measured by a scavenger hunt would not go unfulfilled.
There were some high fives and some laughter. Our brains calmly smoothed the chaos into collusion.
my humble suggestion #3:
There were many student volunteers putting in an extra effort to help out stray parents. Maybe they can be broken into delegates for different sections of educational taxonomy. For example, we'd have kids that had social studies tags, kids with language tags, kids for tech, etc and then you would know that they would know your teacher and they would know they'd have an answer.
Again, I don't know a damn thing. I really admire teachers and am set on elevating them however possible. To us, this event seemed like an exercise in exhaustion, but maybe that's the warmup we need for the next 40 weeks. But…in a world where public schools are constantly under attack by oodles of nefarious interests, it seems like anytime is a good time to demonstrate how great they can be.
That said, the final triumph felt so good. Not the beers immediately after the two-and-a-half hour hunt, but finding the final faculty. One teacher guided us through the crowd to find the last of the list. And she nailed it. There she was in all her glory. The final boss in shorts and a t-shirt with just enough energy to answer all our questions. She was in end-of-the-day mode. A true gift to catch a teacher like this. That awe of being a kid and seeing one outside of the class never abandoned me. So I'm hoping there's some nugget to this lengthy ode to an evening. Maybe I'll end up on some volunteer task force bedazzling large name tags for teachers. That's fine. Just let me know when because I now know enough people to get me to the right place.