Thursday, February 21, 2008

PITA Parents

Got my first taste of PITA (that's Pain In The Ass) Parents today. Prestigious is known for its uptight and demanding parents, and during conference days (the 13th and 14th), I did encounter one mother who got extremely emotional and irrational about her kindergarten-age daughter who wasn't reading yet. But that was just something I was observing, not my problem.

Today, the Vice-Head showed me an email a parent sent to her with "concerns" he still has about my taking over Mr. C's class starting Monday. It started out asking where I'd done student teaching (uh, who cares?) and what my reading teaching strategies were (a fair question), and then just kind of devolved into an all-out criticism of anything and everything about Prestigious. Why don't I hold hour-long conferences with all the parents as soon as possible? Why isn't there an assistant, since there are a whopping 18 kids in the room? Hey, the reading coach doesn't have a master's degree! Hey, some other teacher, Ms. S, is with the kids maybe a couple of hours a week --- and she doesn't have a master's, either! (The parent found this out by searching the school website) And why can't parents visit the classroom whenever they want? And so on.

This email was sent, the Vice-Head told me, immediately after an hour-long conversation with her about the transfer. A conversation which began, she said, ten seconds after she'd sent the original notification email to all the parents.

So, like I've mentioned, I'm meeting the parents tomorrow. Yeah. Pretty enthused about that.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go review my reading teaching strategies.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good luck! No matter what, just act relaxed and try to smile every now and then. :-)

Michael5000 said...

Oi.

Rachel said...

That parent has obviously never attended a master's program. Or, perhaps she has, and was one of those annoying students who actually though having that "M" was something really significant. (This coming from someone almost done with a master's program.) Good luck with the meeting - I agree with mpullen - look relaxed and smile.

Churlita said...

I'm so sorry for you. There were parents like that at my daughters' school and I hated having conferences right after them because they would cut almost a half hour into mine. Ugh.