Parents - Teachers meeting @ Balzac

I had to get up relatively early this morning and get my act together quickly enough to leave the house for about 10:15.

Today is the Parents / Teachers meeting at Jessica's school. This is when we parents all get to go to school and meet with our child's teachers. We have a scheduled meeting with the student's primary teacher (homeroom teacher) who in turn hands us the child's report card. Our primary teacher had scheduled the meetings in reverse alphabetical order. I was actually lucky as our meeting was scheduled for 10:40 rather than closer to 08:30 when she started.

Jessica and I got there on time (actually about 5 minutes late) and stood on the queue outside the teacher's room for a good 15 minutes before being allowed in. As usual the queues outside each room were a completely unorganised mess. Each room had anywhere from one to four teachers in it and people would queue up without knowing which teacher the other parents were queueing for. In our specific case parents would be queueing up for this specific teacher without knowing that there were other parents who actually had appointments. I still suggest the classic New York delicatessan approach of taking a number outside each door and for each teacher.

Eventually we saw the teacher, who was very pleasant, and were graced with Jessica's report card. Jessica's been working very hard lately and it shows in most subjects. She's doing quite well in literary subjects like French and English as well as History/Geography in English and, of course, Art. However her grades were more than problematic in such vital subjets as Math and History/Geography in French. Both of these subjects are vital for the particular Bac (diploma) she is targeting for at the moment (Bac ES).

I soon realised that I was going to need to see more than just the primary teacher. After much waiting in the halls, which was accompanied by the opportunity to meet and greet tons of other parents from our section, we finally saw her Math teacher and her SES (social and economic studies) teacher. That took already an hour and a half and we didn't get to see the other teachers I wanted to see (her History/Geography teacher or her Italian teacher) as they had already left.

Everyone agrees that Jessica is wonderful. No one needed to tell me that. But it's always a pleasure to hear it from someone else who may be less subjective than myself.

However everyone also agreed that Jessica needs to work on her math before the end of the year to prepare herself for next year. She has already been having private tutoring at home on weekends and some evenings for a few months now. But it was time for a more classical approach.

We came home and had the heated discussion about grades and the report card which ended in the now typical heated argument and separation.