Where in the World Isn't Bob Saget?

[JenniferS]

If only my cats could read

Even if they could, you’d never know. Cats don’t follow rules.

 

[Agent H]

View attachment 889362

It’s nice to have real ones but fake ones Last for a very long time and you can just take them out of the garage and put them together.

 

[Figgy1]

If only my cats could read

Picture of squirt bottle

 

[Mr Ferret 75]

 

[Figgy1]

 

[Songbird76]

My two rounds of Fall Parent teacher Conferences are done. I have about 108 students (and the 7th graders twice a day). On Monday night 8 parents showed up and tonight 3 parents showed up. I would have had two more but one mom emailed and said she was at a conference so that was an email conversation. And another mom emailed that she couldn't make it because she had emergency surgery so we emailed for that one too; I give her a lot of credit for that because I know her surgery was a little traumatic and one of her concerns was missing PT conferences.

The conferences I had went well. Every parent thanked me for sending home weekly progress reports. So maybe that is why I didn't have a lot of parents show up, because they can check grades so easily online now and just email with questions at any time. So I'm caught up on grading and have my plans and copies made for next week done. Tomorrow we have off so I can't wait to relax and read my book!

We only went to PT conferences twice for E in junior high/high school. It's completely different over here and you are only allowed to choose 2 teachers per conference. If your child is not doing well, the teachers can request a conference time with you, but if no teacher requests it, you can only meet 2. And since they take 9-16 subjects, there's no way to meet every teacher unless your kid is failing every subject. E never had an insufficient grade, so the only time we were requested was by her mentor teacher in year 4, because he requested every single parent just to meet them all at the beginning of the year. We went in at the requested time, sat down, and he just looked at us like WE were the ones who requested to meet. There was nothing to discuss really because she was doing really well and there were no concerns. It was a complete waste of time. And then the next year, I think that's when my MIL had her stroke and we were trying to get them to move to a care facility because she couldn't take care of herself, and we couldn't be there all the time. So there was a lot of stuff going on and E was struggling a lot with stress, and she got sick and missed a test week, so she had a bunch of tests to make up, so we did go in and talk to the mentor about how to help her get all of the work made up and to let them know if she was tired or not being her normal self, why that might be. And he was super about her getting her teachers notified and getting a schedule set up for makeup work, checked in with her a few times to see how she was doing and if she needed anything, and he got her exempted from the one test so she never had to do that one because it was in his class and he knew that she understood the material. She was one of his best students who was always helping her friends with the material, so he knew she didn't need to take the test to prove she got it, and it was causing her a huge amount of stress trying to figure out when to take that test.

We went to all of A's conferences, and he had great teachers. He was also exempted from a couple of tests from when he was in the hospital for a couple of weeks and missed a ton of school. But we always had to go to conferences for him just because it was a special education school for kids with Autism, and they required the conferences every so often. I always enjoyed going and meeting the teachers and putting a face to the stories. When I was in high school, I remember they just set up tables in the cafeteria for all the teachers and parents just went and sat down with the teacher they wanted to speak to when that teacher was free. And it was the whole school day....there were no classes on conference days. Over here, it's only for a couple of hours in the evening and there are so many parents, they have to have a schedule, and you don't really get to pick the times. If we could have just wandered in to talk to whatever teacher, we would have gone to all of E's, but it was kind of discouraged if you didn't have something specific you needed to discuss and we almost never did, so then you are supposed to leave the appointments for people who actually need it. Kind of sad, really, because there are a lot of teachers that I would really have liked to meet for one reason or the other. We COULD have met 2 every conference, but we never had anything we needed to discuss...it would just be to put a face with the name, and they already had so many parents they had to meet in that 3 hour period. It would have been taking up their time for no reason, so we never did that.