Parent Teacher Conferences

Even though parent teacher conferences happened a long time ago, I haven’t been able to write about it mostly because of computer and internet problems. But better late than never.

Parent teacher conferences happened the day after our attempted palolo hunting. We got back at about 3 or 3:30 am and I had to get up for school about 3 hours later. Those of you who know me, know that I do not do well on less than 9 hours of sleep. So that morning I was even more Crabby Abby than usual, and I basically had no idea what to expect at school that day.

What happens is that the kids get their grade sheets in their first periods and then they go to all their classes and the teachers fill out grades and comments for each student every period. This was stressful for a number of reasons. The kids didn’t have a lesson so a lot of them were just roaming around the classroom looking for trouble. Meanwhile, I was hurriedly trying to fill out all the grade sheets before the bell rang for the next period because all the periods had been shortened. This was especially bad in the classes I had 25 or 26 kids.

During the process, I also noticed that previous teachers would write “fail” instead of simply “F” or write “minus” instead of a simple “-“. I was slightly curious about this, but in my frazzled and hurried state, I didn’t give it much thought. Well, I learned later (after I had filled out all my grade sheets) that teachers do this so that kids can’t turn an “F” into a “B” or a “-“ into a “+”. Interesting. Oh well, too late now.

The grade sheets also asked for the number of absences from each student. At the beginning of the day I started filling this out, but after several arguments with students about how many days they had missed (stupid because neither side had any hard evidence) and noticing that a lot of teachers just left these spots blank, I stopped filling it out. At least next time progress reports come around, I will be prepared.

Since the periods were shortened, all the kids went home after lunch. The teachers had to wait around until 3 pm for the conferences to start. Too tired and hot, to do anything. I put 3 desks side by side and took a nap under Quinn’s most powerful fan. It was not very refreshing.

Me at PTC

The conference took place in the gym. The first time I saw the gym I thought it was weird that it didn’t have walls. It’s just a big cement floor with a roof over it. But I guess this makes sense when the worst weather you have to deal with is rain and the temperature doesn’t get below 76 degrees. (80 degrees or below is cold and everyone puts on sweatshirts. For me, this is the only time I stop sweating.) If the gym had walls it would probably be more of a large sauna. Anyway, there were long tables and chairs set up in the gym starting at 3pm. Parents were supposed to come between 3 and 5pm, pick up their child’s report at the main table, and then make their way to each teacher, who were sitting by grouped by subject.

Most of the parents that came to talk to me were the parents of the students who were doing well in my class. I think I only saw one parent whose child had below a B. This is probably a universal trend for parent teacher conferences. The biggest concern of most parents was whether their child was behaving in class and being respectful. Respecting parents, teachers, and older people in general is a very important part of Samoan culture. None of the parents asked me about the content or curriculum of what I was teaching. Most conversations were very short and went along the lines of “Hi, nice to meet you. Your son is doing very well. He’s one of my best students. He’s very respectful.” But one mother decided she needed to tell me the entire life story of her daughter. So I just listened and nodded and smiled a lot.

I only saw about 20 parents out of my 110 students. Talking to other teachers, this is a pretty typical turnout, even on the high side. After talking to my students the next day I found out that a few parents had come to the conference but had not come to talk to me while they were there. As I was not especially busy (only 20 parents in 2 hours), nor especially hard to identify (I am one of 3 white, female teachers), I suspect they may not have approached me because they felt uncomfortable or unable to speak to me in English. There’s nothing really I can do about this, but I’m glad they at least came to talk to the other Samoan teachers.

After being here for over 4 months, it’s become apparent that most parents are not very involved in their children’s education. There is a lot of pressure from parents to get good grades but beyond that I don’t think there’s much communication about school. Students are told to pay attention to the teacher and do their work. I think this may be because most parents don’t really know where to start to help their child because they were a victim of the poor education system themselves. It’s a struggle sometimes to be one teacher fighting to impact the education of so many students. Changes definitely happen slowly.