Parent-Teacher Night

Wow, Friday was a long day. When I arrived at my first grade class I was greeted by a bunch of hyper kids about to begin a four day weekend, so class was quite tough. After four hours of pulling my hair and trying to put on a sweet face, I walked in the rain over to the next building where I taught a 2 hour class on grammar and spelling to sixth graders, who also didn’t want to be in class. Afterwards I had a five minute breather to compose myself before parent teacher night.

Somehow I had gotten into my head that parent-teacher night is meeting with parents on an individual basis to answer questions. Haha, no. Standing outside the classroom set up for parent-teacher night, a Chinese helper finally came over to tell me what was going on. She said I was to give a 45 minute talk about how I run my class and what I teach to a roomful of parents, while she translates. <insert expletives >

I was ushered into the class room to wait for the final parents to arrive, and contemplate this terrible turn of events. Standing in front of a room full of Chinese parents all looking up at me expectantly, I had to wonder the strange twist of events that led me to this place at this point of time. Then the BSing began, lots of it. I spoke about repetition, importance of environment, inflections, and who knows what else. Every few sentences I would pause for the translation and try to think up something more to say. As I talked I watched the heads nod in agreement. Let’s just say when it was all finally over I was quite happy a very long weekend stretched in front of me.