P is for Parents' Evening

Welcome to my posts for the A to Z Challenge 2016.

This year, I am posting 

Special School Stories

 tales from either my time as a teacher or teaching assistant within classrooms in the U.K. or from my own school days growing up around the country.

I’m not going to bore you with tales from my years of teaching and being the teacher at parents’ evening – although to be honest I’ve always liked parents’ evening because I get time to spend telling parents some of the amazing things their child has done and where their talents lie as well as find out any problems that child may be dealing with.

No … today I will relate an embarrassing story from the very first parents’ evening my parents attended for me!  In those days, children did not go to parents’ evening so I was told how it had gone the following morning over breakfast.  My teacher had told my parents about how well behaved I was and how my reading, writing and arithmetic were progressing well and then she had told them they could look through my school books.  Big mistake!! 

Every morning, we would be asked to write what had happened the previous day or on a Monday morning over the weekend and I had elected to write as one of my news items that week that we had gone to visit my grandparents on their farm and the highlight of the visit (or at least the one I had decided to write all about) was how my poor dad had stepped in a pile of dog dirt and got it all over his shoe.  The fact that I had decided to record the happenings in graphic detail for my teacher to read had not gone down well with my father and I was told that such things should not be written about as “news”.  

I think as all young children sometimes find when writing “news” … boring is probably best which is why as a teacher who has had to read countless accounts of “What I did at the weekend…” shopping and going to the park seem to be all that happens and luckily most parents look where they’re going and don’t step in anything – least ways the children don’t write it down – they just tell me as soon as they’ve got in the classroom on Monday morning!

So come on I'm dying to find out all about those embarrassing things that have happened at parents' evenings or the worst things you've confessed to a teacher or you can write your own "news" of what happened yesterday :)  Go on - you know I'd love to know!