It’s an effective torture. Having spent an entire day incarcerated in
stuffy classrooms faced with decrepit equipment (and I’m not just
talking abut the chalk-boards here!) peering, longingly out at the
bright sun, the cool green grass and the free, unencumbered birds,
whilst having to memorise the third declension past historic tense of
an entirely useless verb of a specious language - that’s bad enough. To
then find yourself walking back into that chamber of misery out of
hours is just cruel.
Worse still, your shoulders, arms and legs were still imprisoned in the
skin-irritating, sweat inducing strait jacket that passed for a
uniform, complete with the remnants of lumpy custard and solid
gravity-defying gravy attached to the noose that bore the school
emblem.
And if these insults to your freedom were not enough in themselves, you
were then expected to chaperone your cheesy-grinned parents round and
through the labyrinthine corridors and accompany them into the presence
of your various Nemeses.
As a child I could never fully understand my parent’s behaviour at these events.
After all, it wasn’t my parents who would have to sit, sweltering and
embarrassed, being discussed as if they weren’t there. It wasn’t them
who had to endure the inevitable and unending patronising comments
about ‘behaviour within peer groups’ and ‘tendency to show distinct
lack of interest’ in subjects that were so irrelevant to daily living,
and of about as much interest as the domestic life of pond weed.
And, oh, the soul churning humiliation of the inevitable list of
questions that appeared from the depths of the ill-fitting jacket that
only saw the light of day for such exhibitions of parental
‘involvement’ in my schooling.
And why did my parents insist on those inane comments? How could they
possible begin to believe that they were witty? Did they not know that
for the rest of the school term, those banal and embarrassing comments
would return to haunt me on a regular basis, as the teachers made
paltry attempts to ‘be my friend’?
Twenty years on, as a parent now....it all looks rather different, though....
It’s funny how much a smell can bring back to mind.
As you walk through the door, accompanied by your off-spring, it
doesn’t matter that you run a multi-national company, or that you
wrangle tigers for a living. Once you walk through those doors and
smell that disinfectant, you are 12 once again. You’re all sweat and
zits. It may, to the outside world, be your child’s performance that is
being discussed, but you know it’s you that’s being graded. And it’s
all you can do to not call the teachers ‘sir’, and heave a sigh of
relief as you leave each room.
No wonder you pulled that jacket out of the wardrobe and wrote that
list of questions so you didn’t forget what you wanted to ask and
slapped that cheesy grin on your face.
After all, now you know the truth. Parents evenings are designed to torture the parents.
