There are a million and one things I love about teaching, but it is one of those careers that has quite a few negatives as well (see ewwww post). I had to experience one of those today. It wasn't the first time and it won't be the last, but it doesn't make it any easier.
Imagine: You are a teacher who is responsible for getting little minds ready for the next school year. You know it is up to you to teach them skills like how to read, add, subtract, write complete sentences... you know, just little stuff like that. You know that parents are looking to you for all answers related to their child. "Why don't they understand this?" "Why are they behaving this way?" "I'm doing everything you told me to. What more can I do?" "What is making them fall behind?" You want to answer all their questions and come up with a magic formula to fix all their child's problems, but guess what? Every child has different issues, some really evident and some totally unexplainable.
Here's the fun part. Imagine: It's conference night. You are already not looking forward to talking to parents all night after talking to their children all day and the only parents who signed up are the ones who you don't need to meet with and two you really don't want to talk to. The reason you don't want to talk to those two parents? You get to tell them that their children will get to do second grade all over again. Yes, retention. Not something that goes over well with many parents. Luckily, I consider myself somewhat intelligent, and have been warning the parents since the beginning of the year that this was a possibility.
The first parent cried, and didn't believe it was necessary until I finally showed her my grade book with all the students' names covered up. I have had a feeling all year that she just assumed I was a crummy teacher. When she saw how much lower her daughter was scoring on each test, she said, "oh wow!" and stopped questioning the retention.
The second parents took it pretty well, but were bummed nonetheless. They knew their son was low and understood that it would be helpful in the long run.
Anyway, a long boring story to show that us teachers do have hearts and HATE breaking bad news to parents. I am not a fan of holding kids back a year, but for very specific circumstances, it actually does help a lot. Hurray to the end of another conference night.
