Back-to-School Night: A kinetic, frenetic experience

Back-to-School Night at our local high school, I have come to believe now that I’ve been through two of them, is primarily a kinetic experience.

Perhaps not coincidentally, kinetic rhymes with frenetic, which happens to be another good adjective for Back-to-School Night, but I’ll get to that later.

At Back-to-School Night at my son’s school, parents are invited to follow their child’s regular class schedule, Blocks A through H, except that each block has been shortened to eight minutes. During those eight-minute blocks, the teachers offer an impressively concise and well-articulated summary of their plans for the school year, but mostly, they say “To learn about the curriculum and my expectations, check my page on the school’s website. To find out how your child is doing with assignments, attendance, and grades, log in to your parent portal account. To speak one-on-one with me about your child, send me an email and we’ll set up an appointment.”

I don’t blame the teachers for this at all. It’s as good a use as any of the eight minutes they are allotted. And it’s true that technology makes it easy to access the kind of information that a teacher of previous generations would have been sorely challenged to summarize in this abbreviated amount of time.

So as I see it, Back-to-School Night is really just about stepping into Tim’s shoes for a couple of hours, almost literally, as I trace his daily path from all-school assembly to A block to B block to C block. I get to see the halls he walks and the classroom displays his eyes rest on when he’s not paying full attention. I get to see and hear the same adults he watches and listens to five days a week.

But only for eight minutes, and then on to the next, which brings me to the part that is not only kinetic but frenetic. Tim’s school is a bewildering maze to me, an incomprehensible network of hallways and right angle turns with classroom numbers whose prefixes change inexplicably from S to I to A. Tim’s freshman year, I made the mistake of coming to Back-to-School Night straight from work, which meant I was wearing heels. It was truly like an anxiety dream come to life as I tottered frantically down the halls eternally searching for rooms whose numbers didn’t seem to exist. This year, I cast fashion to the winds and wore my running shoes, which meant I was able to replicate the previous year's frantic dash of confusion from one wrong turn to the next at a slightly faster and steadier pace, with fewer twisted ankles along the way but no greater luck in finding where I was supposed to be.

At one point, despair overtook me. I was searching for Tim’s social studies class in room H17; somehow the hallway had ended at H15 and I found myself in a dim portico between two buildings. “How can I be so lost?” I wailed out loud.

A student guide materialized and offered to show me the way. Feeling suddenly reassured, I pulled myself together. After all, even if I reached the classroom a few minutes late, I’d still get the visuals. I’d have a look at Tim’s teacher and the classroom wall displays, which was all I seemed able to get out of Back-to-School Night anyway. And if nothing else, I was getting plenty of exercise.

“Next year,” I announced confidently to the parent next to me as I slid into a seat, “I’ll know my way around. I’ll get to every class on time. I won’t make wrong turns or tear my hair out in exasperation.”

“Next year this building will be a pile of concrete,” the parent reminded me.

Oh, that’s right. The new high school is on schedule to open in April. Never again will I navigate Back-to-School Night through this particular maze. Surely the new building has been designed with the directionally challenged, like me, in mind.

But just in case, next year I’m bringing my running shoes again. And also GPS.

Sobering contrasts

It was the strangest and most unsettling coincidental juxtaposition of events, and yet hundreds of parents in our community experienced it this week: transitioning in the course of twenty-four hours from a wake to a funeral to Parents’ Night at school.

In a matter of hours, we moved ourselves from something none of us could have imagined we’d be doing to something all of us take for granted as we proceeded from the service for a 43-year-old father who died suddenly over the weekend to a conversation about math concepts and reading groups.

And yet as sad as we are all feeling, there was something profound about the inadvertent timing of events. It reminded us of the extremes that can affect our children’s lives. The death of a parent: just about the worst thing imaginable to happen to a ten-year-old. A new year of school: stimulating, exciting, full of possibilities and new things to learn.

For those of us who had gone from the wake on Wednesday to the funeral on Thursday to Parents’ Night on Thursday evening – and it appeared to me that there were hundreds in that category – it was a matter of doing what needed to be done: paying tribute to a friend with crushing sorrow, and then sitting down in our kids’ classrooms to hear about what lies ahead for them this year.

Our school takes good care of its kids, intellectually but also socially and emotionally. At Parents’ Night, the focus was exclusively on middle school curriculum. But earlier in the week, there were emails and articles from the school to help us talk to our children about grief. There were opportunities for the kids to talk to guidance counselors. There were school psychologists visiting the classrooms to help the kids try to understand tragedy.

Both experiences – the school’s emergency response and the calm familiarity of Parents’ Night – reminded me that overseeing children’s well-being is a complicated responsibility, for parents and schools alike. We do our best, sometimes in the most difficult circumstances and sometimes, as in the case of teachers who welcome parents to their annual presentation year after year, under the most familiar circumstances. It’s been a painful week for many of us, but Parents’ Night was a soothing reminder that almost without exception, we send our children off every day to a safe, stimulating and nurturing place.

 

Back-to-School Night -- and I feel like I'm going back to school

I’m worried that I won’t be able to find my classrooms. I’m apprehensive that I won’t recognize the teachers. I’m anxious about getting to each class on time. And what on earth am I going to wear?

No, it’s not a stress dream recalling my first day of middle school. It’s me getting ready to attend sixth grade Back-to-School Night as a parent. But I from what I remember of my first day of middle school – which at that time was called junior high – I can’t see a great deal of difference between the two, at least in terms of my state of mind as departure time approaches.

So I’ve laid out my outfit ahead of time, smoothed my hair as much as possible, and asked my son at least three times to recite detailed directions to each of his classrooms (he therefore has the role now that my elder sister did in 1978). Next on my Worry List? That I’ll mispronounce a teacher’s name (fortunately, Liz Gray is at the top of the schedule) or trip in the hallway while changing classes.

In truth, I love Back-to-School Night, and have ever since my very first one when Tim was in the toddler room at Sudbury Small World. It was ten years ago, but I vividly remember a long discussion at that event about why the kids come home with their sneakers full of sand from the sandbox and what parents could do to reduce that problem. (One wonders.) Because while Parents’ Night may be full of the same anxieties as being a student, it also carries some of the same thrill. Will I get called on if I raise my hand? Will I like this teacher? Will any of my friends want to sit next to me? What will they be wearing? Who broke up over the summer? (Actually, while that one may be a thrill in middle school, it can be heartbreaking at our current age. But it still falls under the category of information that can be gleaned via a quick glance around the room at Back-to-School Night.)

Besides, there’s something I know now that I had no clue of when I was a student, and that is this: many of the teachers are just as nervous as we are. And they have to go through both events every year: the first day of school with the kids and Back-to-School Night with the parents. While most of the teachers I know are warier of the second date than the first, it still constitutes two separate occasions of looking out over a sea of curious faces and trying to succeed at this critical first impression.

For some teachers, Back-to-School Night can be a game-changer. Many years ago, my father, a school administrator, had a faculty member on his staff for whom it was so emotionally fraught that she literally could not make it to the event sober. And when I was in prep school, where instead of Parents’ Night we brought our parents to a full day of classes, there was an infamous occurrence in my first-period pre-calculus class that resulted in my math teacher getting fired before Parents’ Weekend was over. (Interestingly, last I heard he was a partner at a major Boston law firm. That strikes me as a little like closing the barn door behind the horse, in that he certainly would have benefited from a better understanding of the law back in his early teaching days, particularly where the legal definition of a minor is concerned.)

In any case, I’m raring to go. I’ve put together an outfit, combed my hair, chosen the right shade of lipstick and brushed my teeth. And if my friend Nicole doesn’t want to sit next to me, I just might come home in tears, but barring that possibility, everything should be just fine.

Back-to-School Night

I joked earlier today that Back-to-School Night is the official start of the fall social season in my circles, the same way a big charity ball in early January is the start of the gala season in Palm Beach. Geeky as it sounds to confess, I love back-to-school night. I’ve loved it ever since Tim was in kindergarten. Partly I like visiting the school and finding out what’s planned for my kids for the upcoming year, but I also like running into all the other Carlisle parents we know. Wandering across the school plaza after dark, waving and greeting and calling out, it always feels to me like a sort of Halloween night for adults, just a great night to be out after dark running into everyone we know.

We’re usually invited half a dozen or so times during the school year to various classroom events, and of course it’s fun to be there when the kids are, to hear them read or perform or whatever the event of the day is. But it feels special, in an almost furtive way, to be there on parents’ night without them. It feels a little like we're spying on them, even though they’ve been preparing all week for our visits with special notes, bulletin board displays, folders of deskwork for us to examine. Or maybe for me it’s the adult equivalent of playing house. Without the actual occupants of the second grade room there, I can pretend I’m a second-grader myself, and all these books and art supplies and other resources are for me.

The school is like a club, a membership club to which we’ll belong for only those years until our two children reach high school. Maybe it’s because our tenure is so tightly defined that it feels so special to me. People who don’t have school-aged kids are still welcome to plenty of the events: concerts, plays, fundraisers. But only while the kids are in grades K through 8 are we really part of the fabric of the school. Even before I had children, I suspected I would like the grade-school years best as a parent; now that we’re in the thick of them, I can’t imagine that I’ll be any happier when my kids are older. I love having them be part of the school community. I’m delighted with the teachers, the policies, the procedures, the general ambiance. I like the winter holiday concert and the Spaghetti Supper, the kindergarten rainforest play and the seventh grade musical, the first day of school and Field Day, the Chinese New Year celebration and Move-Up Day. With three years between the kids’ grade levels, the elapsed time between Tim’s first day of kindergarten and Holly’s eighth grade graduation is 11 years and 9 months. We’ve got about 6 years and 9 months left to go.

Rick and I get a lot of support as parents. My list of people in addition to Rick whose presence serves to fortify my efforts goes on and on, from the other moms in Holly’s preschool playgroup to our pediatrician, plus lots of friends, neighbors, community members and, more than anything else, family members. But also playing a major role in my kids’ upbringing is their school. And I so happily welcome the evening every fall when we get to go and re-establish contact with the institution, its staff, and all the other members of our not-so-secret society.