Tonight is my most disliked event at public school, the spring Parent Teacher. As a former teacher I have sat on the other side of the table many, many times so I know what the teacher's goals generally are with each meeting. That doesn't make me like it any better as a parent.
The first Parent-teacher of the year is essentially a recap of the orientation/meet the teacher meeting a month earlier. They tell you about themselves a bit, then go into the goals for the whole class then how my child fits into those goals. Usually, its at this point where we all acknowledge my sweet little girl, while a happy, pleasant and hard working child, has some reading difficulties. It's not that she doesn't know what to do when she comes to a word she doesn't know, she just doesn't have the patience to use her skills to properly decode the word. Then we discuss any resources available to her, hear some promises to "see what they can do" since my child doesn't have severe reading issue and isn't a behavior concern, she doesn't demand the same level of resources as other children. Then that's it. Our 10 minutes are up. The spring meeting is typically a different story. It's at that time when teachers are looking at how the children are doing as a whole and start (yes, at this late stage) to get concerned about my child moving on to the next year (although every single child is pushed through up to the end of grade nine, unless parents scream and yell against it). There's talk of summer reading and extra resources for the last 2 months of school...before she goes off and has a break of two months, basically forgetting what she's been taught and any gains are lost. Useless.
It's this year especially that I find this particular parent teacher useless. My child will be changing schools next year, with the rest of her classmates, and I know nothing that is said in this meeting will be carried forward into the new school in September. Her cum card will follow her, as will her two bullet point (!) IEP, but that's it. No one meets with the other school to discuss the children on IEPs and what resources they would need. They wait until the children are in the classrooms and either failing or behaving badly before they even look at their files. This is typical in public school. When I taught it wasn't until December that the resource teacher would even ask for input on a child's IEP. It usually wasn't until then that I would even know if a child had a learning issue, unless I took it upon myself to find out, a process that involves you getting permission to see these records then going into either a card cabinet or computer to find the file and review it. Then lets assume the teacher even has training in special needs/learning difficulties and can understand what the impact is of having a child with a non-verbal, comprehension issue with a university level math in the classroom or can interpret a psycho-educational assessment. I once found out that a girl who had been in my grade 11 history class for three months wasn't actually shy, as her other teachers had told me when I asked if she participated in their classes, but couldn't speak more than a few words in English! That would have been slightly helpful to know!
It's especially frustrating because I taught children with learning difficulties and disabilities for 7 years in a local private school. I wrote over 600 IEPs (typically between 3-5 pages in length), updated them twice yearly, attended resource handover meetings between schools and adjusted every grade in the NS curriculum to accommodate for varying levels of student understanding in the classroom. I know what my child can and can't do and I know she's getting all she's going to get in regards to resources in the public school. That's why this particular parent-teacher meeting is so ridiculous, because there's essentially nothing they can give my child that will make any significant difference in her learning over the next 2 months but the teacher will act panicked and very worried and will totally stress me out for no reason, but it will make them feel better in the end for "bringing this issue to our attention"....yeah, like we didn't already know.
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