Back to School Night

My final Back to School Night is over.  The annual ritual of opening the school building for parents to enter the building always was a dichotomy of feelings.  Last night was no different.  After all, in my current position as instructional coach, my attendance is not really necessary.  I have no students who come to me on a daily basis.  And,due to the fact that I have been in my current position for the past four years, there aren't too many students who even know who I am.

So what does an instructional coach do at  Back to School Night?  Well, I spent the whole night making sure that parents had their login and password to check their student's grades on Pinnacle.  That did give me the chance to renew relationships with former students who are now parents, and, unbelievably, grandparents.  One of those parents was that first grader whom I wrote about in an earlier blog, Kenny.  His son is now a freshman at North!

Seeing my former students did make the evening go a little faster.  There have been times in the over 40 Back to School Nights of the past when the length of the night seemed forever.  Sometimes the never-ending evening was because I had no parents to talk to.  I remember one year that I was teaching five periods of a six period day.  That night I had one parent.  The upside was that the parent had tired of going from room to room and decided to stay with me.  He probably thought I was lonely.

When I was a principal, my job was to be in the entry way and greet the parents as they came in the building.  For the most part, that was a great job.  It built up my ego, because they parents who came to Back to School Night were the ones who were happy with the school, so they praised the school and me.  There were exceptions due to conflicts with teachers and parents, but none were so bad that I had to call in the police.

The Back to School I remember the best was when I was teaching English at North.  That year I had my Humanities class and all junior academic English classes.  Translated, I had all good classes.  I had a strong contingent of parents, all very happy with me.  That isn't what made that night memorable.  The memory comes from the teacher across the hall from my room.

She was a very strict teacher who had transferred to North from a junior high school when they became middle schools.  In fact, she was teaching at that junior high when I was there as a student, though I never had her as a teacher.  I was, however, very aware of her reputation.  Her nickname at both schools was "The Sergeant."  To say that she was strict would be diminishing the word strict.

In her first year as a high school teacher, she did not compromise her principals.  If a student didn't do the work, that student failed.  Actually, pretty much all of her students were failing when Back to School rolled around.  She challenged them to work hard; for the most part, they didn't accept the challenge.  So, she told them to have their parents come to Back to School Night so that she could get them to help her straighten out these students.  I think she didn't really believe that many would come.

They did.  Boy did they come!  From  before we started the annual shuffle between classes, until well beyond the time we were to conclude the night's activities, there was a line.  The line went past all of the other English teachers' classrooms.  No one left the line to go to other classes.  Each and every parent was steadfast in their need to talk to this teacher.

She didn't waiver.  She laid out the facts to each and every parent.  The parents pleaded with her to realize that she was too strict.  So, many of them went directly from the room to the principal.  Some came to me, because I wasn't that busy.   I had little to offer them other than to say that this teacher knows her subject.

She stayed on at North for over 20 years.  She became my department chair.  She became a friend.  In the end, she recommended me to be department chair when she left.  What I could never get through to her was that when a student fails, we as teachers are a part of that failure, sometimes a big part.  That is what I learned that night years before when I defended a principal that I didn't believe.