After attending a small alternative middle school for three years, our daughter decided, for her first year of high school, to try a more conventional public school, Kennedy High School in Granada Hills here in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. She made it through the year and even got good grades in all her classes except for math (see “Tutoring Geometry”) where I helped her get through with a passing grade, even though she practically speaking learned nothing but a healthy dis-ease with lines, shapes, angles, areas and volumes.

Halfway through the second semester, parents at Emma’s school were invited to the typical “back to school night” where they would have the opportunity to meet each of their kid’s teachers. The conventional wisdom and general expectation was that this would be an opportunity for parents to discuss with each teacher how their student was doing in terms of their grade, and if that ranking was less than ideal, what the parents could do (including cajoling their student to do) to get that grade up. Our daughter, our son (now in his fourth year of homeschooling), and I discussed this upcoming event and decided that the three of us would go, but not with the conventional agenda.

It was our consensus upon plan instead, to engage each of our daughter’s teachers in a fun conversation about where the teacher was at regarding the subject they were teaching and the process of teaching itself. We agreed to preface each conversation by clearly indicating to the teacher that we had no interest in grades or discussing how our daughter was doing in terms of any kind of quantified academic ranking. This appealed to me and her brother as a wildly perverse and interesting experiment, and Emma gave her okay to proceed with this strategy. Following through on this project, we engaged with five people, wearing the teacher hat, with five very different approaches to the challenging profession of middle school teacher.

Encounter One: English

The first encounter was with our daughter’s English teacher. When we told her up front that we were not interested in grades or how our daughter was doing, but instead wanted to talk to her about what she enjoyed about being a high school English teacher, she was visibly uncomfortable. Having overheard her chatting with other parents before us, I’m sure she was primed to deliver a short speech on how well our daughter was doing and the academic path forward through high school, high-stakes ACT and SAT testing and potential scholarships for college. Despite our initial statement to the contrary, she launched into her speech… “Your daughter is a very good student…” I responded by graciously thanking her for that acknowledgment, but that again, we were not interested in an evaluation of our daughter but just connecting with her about the process of teaching English.

I recall that we managed to try and have a conversation about some of the books they were reading in class that Emma had liked and what the teacher like about them as well, plus how it was teaching a classroom full of preteens. But like a befuddled but ever exuberant android, she always tried her best to bring the conversation back to our daughter’s academic path forward – including upcoming high-stakes tests, opportunities for college scholarships and ways we parents could support our student’s academic progress. Finally, still showing some discomfort with the conversation, she thanked us for coming, excused herself politely, and moved on to the next parent, with the hope I’m sure of a more conventional conversation.

Encounter Two: Geometry

We had a different sort of conversation with our daughter’s Geometry teacher, who was as jaded and burnt-out as the English teacher had been zealous. Unlike the discomfort displayed by the previous teacher, when we told him that we were not interested in discussing our daughter’s grade, you could see him visibly relax. According to our daughter, just about every student in this Geometry class was failing or (like her) constantly in danger of doing so. He had probably already had any number of attending parents querying him about how their kid was doing and forcing him to diplomatically deliver the bad news and a suggested path forward for absolution.

Relieved of this duty in our case, he and I proceeded to have a conversation about how much we both liked math. He confessed that though he had enjoyed teaching Geometry over the years, he was frustrated that this current crop of “teenagers” (spoken with rolled eyes) were just not getting it. I asked him if he was able to do anything to make Geometry relevant to his students’ lives or show them how it would be useful to them going forward. He shook his head and said that there was not time for that, there was too much required material to slog through. He also shared that he was hoping to soon get out of the game by retiring.

Encounter Three: History

Our daughter’s history teacher was another case. He had had the instinct to try, initially, making class interesting by, according to our daughter, assigning reading the text book for homework and then trying to have a discussion about it the next day in class. Our daughter had enjoyed this approach and, unlike most of her student comrades, participated actively in class discussions and done well on the tests. But because most of her fellow students were failing on the tests, he had in desperation ended class discussion and resorted to having them outline the textbook in class instead, hoping that somehow they would, through osmosis, remember the material long enough to regurgitate it on the tests. For our daughter, this had turned a previously interesting class into a deadly boring one.

When we engaged him that night, I quickly launched into a discussion about Twentieth Century history, which was of great interest to me and my son as well. I was shocked at how little he knew about this topic, beyond what was actually in their textbook. I recall that he barely knew anything about the events and issues that brought Castro to power in Cuba.

I shared with him that Emma had enjoyed class a lot more when they had class discussions, and asked him if the new book-outlining strategy was helping the kids get better grades. He shrugged and said that it was helping a little, but confessed that, as Emma had indicated to me earlier, class had become pretty boring.

Encounter Four: Digital Arts

Finally there was one somewhat diamond in this otherwise rough. Because our daughter was enrolled in her high school’s “Digital Arts” magnet program, she had a mandatory elective (oxymoron perhaps?) “Introduction to Digital Arts” class. Her teacher was an exuberant character, who loved her subject matter, loved her students, and was willing to talk with us endlessly about anything and everything. The four of us – my son and daughter, her and I – had a wide-ranging discussion about art, politics, compulsory school, educational alternatives, and more. In fact we continued to talk with her after the scheduled event had completed until the janitors kicked us out so they could clean up.

Epilogue

The experience of “back to school night” reminded me a bit of scenes from Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now”, where the protagonist (played by Martin Sheen) navigates his way up the river encountering an array of soldiers, some shell shocked, some fear-ridden, and others manically embracing the insanity of the war they were all in the midst of. It was life in the “trenches” of a public “instructional institution”, full of anxiety and despair, mixed with exuberance and zeal and a little more anxiety thrown in for good measure.

So Emma made it through one year of conventional instructional high school featuring these four teachers as her guides as well as a couple others not mentioned above but falling somewhere within the same spectrum. After completing that year, and again given the options to continue, go to a somewhat alternative school or homeschool, she decided on the latter.