Nightmare Before Thanksgiving

All this week we held parent conferences. There are no students during the regular school hours. We use all the time to allow our parents to come in for a thirty minute conference. We plan it so that, if a family has students in several grades, then the conferences are all back to back. It also gives us a little free time to write our report card comments, and to correct papers. I love that about my school. Our normal school days are slightly extended to get in all our required hours of instruction each trimester, so that we can use the three days before Thanksgiving to hold these conferences. We also stay till 7:00 P.M.on Tuesday for the people who cannot come during the day. This is a shift-work city, so we manage to get a time for nearly everyone.

However, this year, I had several No-shows. This is unusual in my experience at this school, because we have such terrific parents, generally, too. For one student who didn't come in, I was feeling a little suspicious that perhaps he didn't actually give his confirmation notice to mom. He has a tendency to feign disbelief and declare his innocence a little too enthusiastically when busted for failure to turn in homework, etc. So, I just looked up his address, and at the end of my day, I gathered up all his paper work and headed over to his house.

It looked dark when I pulled up, but I could see a light on upstairs, so I rang the doorbell. I rang it again. Just as I prepared to knock on the door, it opened. I introduced myself, and asked if she was his mom. She was, and she invited me in. She, too, had an excellent reaction to the failure to know about the conference. Maybe it was real, but...it didn't matter. We could have the conference now.

We looked at his progress report. We reviewed his pre and post tests. We discussed a few things that could help boost his pretty dismal grades, and I was showing her what we'd be teaching in the second trimester that is starting in a week, when he burst through the front door, with his friend in tow. The look on his face!

How would you feel if you were just finishing the third day in a row of NO SCHOOL (!!!) and you came bounding through your front door only to find your teacher (!!!) sitting with your mom, talking about you and how you're doing in school??? Well, just imagine that face for a minute. He was flabbergasted. SHE KNOWS WHERE I LIVE...

Plus, then he had to sit down with us and go over the progress report and get grilled by Mom about why he didn't have all his assignments turned in, and why he had such crummy scores on the ones he did manage to turn in, etc. etc. So, I encouraged him to bring in that report next Monday, and I'd go with him to the reading classroom and we'd try to find some of those missing worksheets and see if we couldn't resolve some of these problems. I assured Mom that he was usually respectful to me, and always charming and polite (which is true) and I walked out to my truck on that note.

I bet he is still shuddering a little, thinking about me being in his house. A kid isn't safe anywhere these days.