Night Conferences Get Heavy

We had FOUR days of parent/teacher conferences this week— including two three-hour night sessions from 5 PM to 8 PM—I truly do not understand why our district does this (we also have a four-day session in the spring) and so I try to keep things terse, brief, and very dry— unlike some teachers who are congenial and bubbly for 12-16 conferences in a row, I just don't have that kind of social stamina, and so I review the quiz and writing grades, tell the parent if the kid is missing anything, and then ask if they have any questions—but inevitably most of the conferences get deep and weird—no one ever asks about the books we are reading or the content of the class, they just want to know psychological stuff about their kid, which is way outside my purview; here are some things that were said this week:

"He will not open his mind to me . . . he says he likes the class, but he will not give me details . . . he will not tell me the details of his day"

and I try to be empathetic to these parents, but I think I said to this very nice Asian mom, "He's a teenage boy . . . maybe when he's thirty?"

and another woman—wondering what her son's college essay was about because he wouldn't share it with her and I had read it—expressed a desire to "crack open his head" and see what was inside, and I was thinking: you might not want to see inside a teenage boy's head . . .

a parent asked if she thought her son was "stressed while writing this essay," and I said I did not know, but he got a good grade . . .

another mom confessed that her son's room is very messy and she thinks he has ADHD . . . I said he did very well on his reading comprehension quiz

and one lady, who brought her son to the conference, half-complained that her son "does robotics for three or four hours each day" and I think she was insinuating that he should study more, but I said, "Wow . . . maybe he'll build me a new knee!"

but I shouldn't complain; all of my parents were very nice and very concerned, and nothing was as odd and weird as what happened to the history teacher next door, who had a mom come in all fired up, and she complained about how her son's new Audi was getting covered with sap in the school parking lot because of some offending tree, and he was like, "Maybe you should talk to the vice-principal about that . . . he's in charge of senior parking."