Conferences and Concerts

At this time last week, I was busy stressing over parent/teacher conferences.

And a bunch of other things.

But mostly parent/teacher conferences.
Parent/teacher conferences freak me out, mostly due to the "parent" aspect. Parents scare me.

Parents scare me A LOT.

I know that it is a totally irrational fear. I can count the number of negative interactions that I have had with parents on one hand.

In fact, I could even lose a finger in a tragic paper-cutter accident and still have enough fingers left on which to count my actual negative parent interactions.

But I have heard stories.
Scary stories.
Terrifying stories.
Stories that involve yelling and screaming and threatening and pushing and throwing and lawyering and all sorts of other horrid things.

Veteran teachers tell angry-parent-stories the way that grizzled old one-legged Alaskan miners with eye patches tell stories about their encounters with grizzlies that resulted in the losses of their legs and eyes.

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise then that the tellings and retellings of these stories have left me, a relatively new and impressionable teacher, with deep emotional scars.

Thankfully this round of conferences turned out the same way that the majority of my other conferences have: 134 positive interactions with polite and/or kind parents/stepparents/grandparents/etc.

I was prepared, however for any outcome thanks to my carefully thought-out parent/teacher preparation pack.



And, of course, my pre-conference and post-conference secret weapon.

In other news, our junior high band concert was two days ago. The bands only have one real concert before our yearbook deadline, so we really needed to get photos. The fact that most of the yearbook staffers are in the bands made it kind of difficult for them to do photo duties though, so I ended up playing paparazzo that night.

I also had a hair cut scheduled for that afternoon, so I ended up going to the concert sporting a newly trimed fauxhawk. That made for a whole lot of fun kidlet interactions as I wandered around taking candids backstage. One of my favorite kidlet comments was, "Miss Haws! You wore your after school hair!"

And in case you were wondering...

School hair

After school hair

My other favorite kidlet comment came after one little musician eyeballed my taller and pointer than normal hair: Umm, Miss Haws? You know it's not that kind of concert, right?

But I didn't mind that it wasn't that kind of concert. I was just happy to be attending a school-related event that didn't necessitate the preemptive consumption of anti-nausea treatments.