Parent Teacher Conferences (Round 2)

Last Thursday and Friday I had my second set of parent/teacher conferences. I'm always pumped about them the day before and usually the morning of but as the day wears on I get so tired. I have a huge class so I had conferences straight from 7a.m. to 2p.m. with one fifteen minute break. Thursday all of my parents showed, but on Friday I had a few who didn't. It was nice to have that down time between conferences.

Most of parents wanted to talked about the silliest things, as usual. One parent complained that I numbered my Math tests. My Math tests look similar to this:

1.   2 + 3 =

2.   4 + 5 =

So this parent told me that his son was reading the numbers as 12 + 3 and 24 + 5 and getting confused. BUT even if that were the case this kid wasn't answering 15 and 29 on his test. Actually he left 13 out of 15 answers blank, after being asked repeatedly to finish his test. So I told the parents I didn't have to number it, but that their child didn't understand the content. I thought they were pretty ticked off with me but they sent him to my tutoring session on Saturday where he proclaimed to me in Spanish "Miss, I studied addition a lot last night and now I understand it better". WHOO HOO! So something I said must have gotten through to them. I made sure to thank his mom for the extra effort she put in.

Another parent in my class who has NEVER spoken a word of English to me, proceeded to speak to me only in English during the conference. His son is by far the worst student in my class. This kid steals, lies, hits other students, refuses to do his work, and just knows how to push my buttons. I have had a few conferences with his parents and Miss Peggy and the man never spoke English to either one of us. That would have been very helpful as I was trying to figure out possibly solutions for his son. Some of these people are strange birds I tell you!

But over-all the conferences went well. No one was too terribly angry at me and I had one parent even tell me how much he appreciates the time and effort I put into teaching his daughter. That's always nice to hear :).

On Friday Ella (Anne's counterpart) comes up to me and calls me a "pinguina". I asked her why she said that and she said it was because I walk like a penguin. Then she imitated my walk and it was HYSTERICAL! After that I imitated Rosita walking her students down the hallway and then Rosita imitated me, Arlington, and Ella. I have most of it on video and I was so excited to show it to all of you, but al my pictures and videos are currently trapped in my memory card. Another teacher at school had me take some pictures for her and then she took my memory card to print out a few. Well she reformatted my memory card in the process and now my computer won't read it. It's a huge bummer but hopefully I'll find a computer soon that can read the images so I can get them onto a CD.

I hope the weather doesn't get too bad there -- it sounds like things could get crazy! If you're off from work or school today enjoy it :)

"I believe in pink. I believe that laughing is the best calorie burner. I believe in kissing, kissing a lot. I believe in being strong when everything seems to be going wrong. I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls." -Audrey Hepburn