Conferences = Purgatory

Hey, all you parents out there. You think YOU hate going to parent-teacher conferences? I sit here tonight fairly confident that I have every single one of you beat on that point. Beat down hard.

Time was I was young, and idealistic, and blindly naive about the world and saw conferences as a great opportunity. "I'll have a broader picture of each student after meeting their families!" "What a great opportunity to help build a sense of community!" And several other similar empty platitudes that probably should have earned me a good hard slap in the head for being such a moon-faced idiot.

Conferences are not these things. Conferences are just long. And tiring. And then longer. I won't go into any detail about the types of parents that show up for conferences and the personality categories I shove them into since I've done that before, but I will say that on principle I will hate any parent who brings a preschooler to conferences when that preschooler doesn't know how to behave in public. I refuse to sit there and share in an exchange of sympathetic simpering grins as little three year old Travis or Chloe or Caitlyn or Caitlynn or Katelyn or Kaitlinn or Kayte-Lynn runs around screaming and crying and laughing hysterically and destroying my classroom as her / his parents sit and do nothing about it. Few things bother me more.

Worst thing about the conferences this year? Between the two nights we had scheduled this week, I chose the night off to go home and DREAM THAT I WAS HAVING CONFERENCES. I was in the media center instead of my room. My grade level partners weren't there so I didn't have their help to keep things rolling along as smoothly as they did for us in real life this year. I sat down with a parent who in the dream I knew had a horrible reputation for Conference Evil, and she sat and drew bizarre diagrams of every point I tried to raise before abruptly leaving. And all the while, people kept coming in and interrupting me by checking out books from the media center.

And several of those media visitors were noisy little pre-schoolers.