The chair was about 28 centimetres high. Rob folded himself onto it in Mrs Hartley's classroom on Monday at 4:40 with his knees up near his ears, his phone silenced and a face of enormous good manners, and I had to look out of the window for a moment. Parents' evening in Year 1 is a very small-furniture event. The tables come up to your shins and the pencil pots are all labelled in capital letters.
We had two ten-minute slots: Alfie's with Mrs Hartley at 4:40 and Isla's with Mr Bell at 5:00. Linda came over at four to give the children their tea and keep an eye on them. Ten minutes sounds like plenty. It isn't, because the teacher talks for the first four and the last minute is all coats and apologies.
What I used to ask
Years ago I'd go in and ask, "Is she happy?" and "Is he doing all right?" Both questions get the same answer. "Lovely," the teacher says, and smiles, and there are six minutes left and nothing to say. The same goes for "Is she reading enough?" because the answer is "She could always read more", which is also true of me. I haven't stopped caring about the answers. I've just learned that the question isn't going to get them.
What I ask now
I write the questions in my phone the night before, three or four at a time, and I read them off the screen as if it's a shopping list. These are the ones that got real answers this year:
- What are they like when I'm not there?
- Who do they play with at playtime?
- Where are they compared with where you'd expect them to be by now?
- What's the one thing we could do at home before Christmas?
The first one is the best. Mrs Hartley laughed and said that Alfie is "a talker" and that he tells the whole carpet about dinosaurs, then sits on his hands when he's supposed to be listening. That's both completely him and information I couldn't have got any other way. She said he's right where she'd expect in reading, his handwriting is getting smaller and tidier, and he can't be separated from Zain.
The home one was one thing, as asked: a few minutes of reading aloud each evening, to me rather than silently to himself. It has the ring of something he'll resent and then like. Alfie had asked me to pass on a request to be line leader. I did, she wrote it down, and this morning he was line leader and came out of the door at pick-up with the look of a man who has run a small country.
Isla's ten minutes
Mr Bell's chairs were bigger, which made the whole thing feel like a slightly grander meeting. Isla's reading is well above where he expects, her spelling is good and her stories "have a voice". He showed me one about a lighthouse. Her maths is sound, but she skips lines in her working and then loses marks for it, so the thing for home is writing out every step even when it feels pointless. She will not enjoy this.
The answer to question two was the surprise. Isla has two friends she plays with and one she isn't sure about. It was a small remark, said gently, and not a worry as such, but I'd never have got it from the school gate. I'm not going to do anything with it. I'm just going to listen a bit harder at tea.
Before we left, Isla had asked me not to mention her netball, so I didn't. Mr Bell mentioned it instead, saying she's become "a surprisingly ferocious wing attack", and I kept my face very still.
What I've stopped asking
I've stopped asking about other children ("How does she compare with the others?"), because they won't say and they shouldn't. I've stopped asking about homework in a general way, because it's always fine. And I've stopped trying to ask everything. Ten minutes will do three good questions and one good answer, and that's enough.
At bedtime on Monday, Alfie, who was five for four more days, asked whether Mrs Hartley had said he was good. "She said you were good at telling stories and bad at sitting still," I said. He thought about this for a moment. "That's right," he said, and turned over.
