Parent Teacher Night

My body may have been deep in my crappy Ikea couch tonight, but my mind was at my the high school where I taught the last ten years where my past colleagues stayed at work until 9pm to host parent teacher night.

My first parent teacher night in Bushwick was when I realized how important this night was to figuring out my students as people. Seeing who my students went home to at night peeled back layers and layers of who they were and they made so much more sense. I feel very strongly that so much of us comes from our parents--the good and the bad--and that once you meet someone's parents you truly begin to understand their quirks and neuroses. When you observe how the parents dress and how they carry themselves, once you hear how they speak, once you watch how they beat or berate their kid in front of you for the bad grades, once can realize that their kid has them more duped than he had you, once you see a single mom cry after she reads her son's college essay about her....Wow. So much is said by both words and body language on parent teacher night.

I miss that window into my students' worlds.

Because now I teach adults. They may mostly be one year older than my prior students as freshmen in community college, but they are no longer wards of the NYC Department of Education and they are paying for their education. After the first day of class, I stood in my empty room after my students left and made mental notes of which parents to call when I realized, "I don't have anyone's phone number!" Several times I have wanted to call when a student was absent, or if s/he did something amazing, but I can't.

It's so strange!

But I also realize how--developmentally--it's important. It's time for personal responsibility to kick the f*ck in finally. Now my students have nobody to fail but themselves in this attempt to secure their human capital through education and a degree, and it's high time they know that. Nobody's checking on you, so check yourself (before you wreck yourself, as Ice Cube would say).

And, as a control freak, it's time for me to let go, too. Grow up, my students. And welcome to the harsh, and often rewarding, world of adulthood.