“I’ll smash that little sucker right in the schnozz. “That’s just what I’ll do,” she declares, sitting up straighter. I can see her contemplating the scene with something like relish. “Next time he laughs at you, cock your arm back and sock the little bastard in the nose as hard as you can.” “Punch him in the face.” She looks up sharply. I look at her understandingly, and proffer a suggestion. “When I tell him that he just laughs at me,” she pouts, shrugging again.
“Why don’t you tell him you’ll take it away from him if he doesn’t do his homework?” I ask. She looks at me with a helpless little shrug of her shoulders. “He’s on his computer all the time,” she says. “I just don’t know what to do with him,” she says. She’s slouch-backed and downhearted – I’m not the first teacher she’s seen that night. Mom is looking haggard, pushing wisps of bedraggled gray hair from a face that also looks, unsurprisingly, like a pudding. So I begin my little talk with the mom, telling her that – let’s call him Larry – that while Larry is very smart and has a lot of potential, he’s been missing homework assignments, performing poorly on tests, disrupting class, etc., etc., ad nauseam. The kind of kid teachers particularly loathe – an intelligent under-achiever with an attitude. He’s impertinent, impolite, impudent, insolent. His face looks like a rotten raisin pudding and his demeanor is about as charming. The mother of a certain 14 year-old boy who is very clever, congenitally lazy, and remorselessly rude. Parents’ Night sucks.Ī mom sits across the desk from me. They’re dull and often awkward (try spending an evening spouting qualified, politic phrases like “not quite working up to her full potential,” or “shows promise but needs to work hard on her basic English skills” when what you really mean is that Tiffany is as bright as a bag of rocks and not likely to get much brighter), and they eat into the time you could be at home marking papers or playing with your kids.
Be not illusioned, teachers hate parents’ nights. I’m not there as a parent, but as a teacher of Upper Secondary English at a private British School in Hungary. There’s just really no way to construe this as a polite greeting, even for a Nederlander
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