Why Parents Dread Back to School Night
Writing in the Washington Examiner, Meghan Cox Gurdon shares the boredom -- and terror -- of going back to school for parent-teacher night.
One evening every September -- and more than one, if your family attends several schools -- you must traipse back to the same building from which you retrieved your children only hours before.
Into the auditorium and classrooms you go, to hear what the principal and teachers have planned for your little rascals. The idea is to inculcate a sense of shared commitment between parents and teachers.
Unfortunately, no matter how much you love your children, no matter how interested you are in what they're learning and who's educating them -- no matter, even, how much you esteem the school and the people who staff it, back-to-school night is a total drag.
There's just no getting around it. Oh, some schools jazz things up by laying out children's artwork and essays. That's nice, but you've still lost the evening. Some schools hold out the enticement of wine-and-cheese receptions after all the teachers have made their presentations. That's nice, too, but by the time the corks pop it's almost 11 and in eight hours everyone's got to be headed back here again.
Maybe the real problem is that back-to-school night is an unsettling reminder of one's own school days. Squatting on a first-grader's chair, or squeezing into an eighth-grader's desk in a row of desks facing forward, can summon up old anxieties.
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