Parent-teacher conferences, one last time

As usual, I was a little lost trying to find my daughter’s fifth grade classroom. This entire second-floor wing didn’t exist when I attended school here myself – in fact, the building that housed my fifth grade classroom is now the subject of townwide debate as to whether it should be preserved as a historical artifact or simply torn down – and I can never remember which stairwell leads to which part of the fifth grade area.

So the thought that this was probably the last time I’d have to try to find Holly’s classroom as I hurried to our parent-teacher conference was momentarily encouraging. Our school does conferences in December and March; this might be my last visit to the classroom all year, and if I do go back for some kind of end-of-year event, there will probably be lots of other parents I can follow.

But the relief of thinking I’d never again get lost on my way to a parent-teacher conference was fleeting, because right after it came the realization that it wasn’t just a matter of knowing other parts of the campus better than the fifth grade section. The reality was that this might have been my last parent-teacher conference ever, since middle school teachers typically don’t schedule conferences with parents.

It was yet another milestone moment, just one of many I seem to experience throughout every school year, but perhaps especially this year, with Tim about to graduate from eighth grade and Holly on her way to middle school. Parent-teacher conferences have been a semi-yearly event for me throughout the better part of the past decade. Could this really be the final one?

In those first few years of school, conferences seemed profoundly important. The chance to sit down alone with my child’s teacher and hear all about what he or she was doing – their strengths, their weaknesses, their interactions with peers, their typical attitude throughout the school day – was a source of fascination, an opportunity to spend twenty whole minutes learning about an objective adult’s impressions of my child. Conferences in kindergarten and first grade carried the same excitement as the kids’ first few infancy check-ups: the two-week visit, the four-week visit, the six-month visit. How much weight has he gained? What percentile? What new developmental milestones can we record?

Of course, whether it’s parent-teacher conferences or infant physicals, it’s fun when everything is going well. The fact that I enjoy these opportunities only underscores how fortunate I’ve been as a parent to have healthy babies who grew into smart, cooperative schoolchildren. My delight in getting to hear other adults’ impressions of them, whether medical or educational, is duly tempered by the awareness that it’s sheer luck of the draw that enables me to sit and beam over my child’s math scores or latest attempts at haiku while another parent is poring over troublesome x-rays or proof of inability to read. There’s no reason I get the fun meetings while another parent gets the other kind. It’s just another thing to be both mystified by and grateful for in equal measure.

Now, though, enough years have gone by that parent-teacher conferences aren’t quite as exciting as they once were. I still love to talk with Holly’s teachers, and I still find it flattering when they compliment her, but a part of me realizes by now that no parent-teacher conference can possibly give a parent everything she wants. No teacher can promise that good test scores in fifth grade assure top marks in middle school. Or that a ready willingness to play with the new kid at recess means she’ll never get caught up in bullying behaviors in the lunchroom. Or even that one teacher’s overall enthusiasm about my child means that she’ll always be well-liked and treated so kindly.

Maybe I’ll miss these meetings when the next parent-teacher conference day rolls around and I realize my family has aged out, or maybe I’ll feel like we have enough perspective on our children as parents not to need the feedback from professionals that once seemed so valuable. Tim starts high school in six months, and from what I understand, we’ll know a lot less about what’s going on at school in general after that. It will be his world, not ours, and no one will feel obligated to report back to us, other than through that most linear of metrics, report cards.

I hope I’m ready for that change. Their school has treated them wonderfully, and I’ve enjoyed every opportunity I’ve had over the years to sit down with their teachers. But it’s time to move on now: for them, and for me as well. They need to learn that success means trying hard even long past the point where anyone hands you a report card. And I need to learn that being proud of your children doesn’t require a scheduled meeting to review their performance as much as it just means observing, appreciating, and celebrating.

Aspen Summer Words: Registration submitted, ready to go

This wasn’t my usual type of procrastination. The usual type runs along the lines of “I should do that but I don’t want to do it yet but I ought to just get it done but I’ll get to it soon but just not right now.” This time, it was procrastination more along the lines of putting a Hershey’s chocolate kiss on the kitchen table and telling yourself you won’t eat it quite yet. Not really procrastination at all as much as holding off on a reward until you really feel like you’ve earned it.

I hadn’t earned this one at all, just been lucky enough to stumble into it, but after holding off with my mouth watering, in a figurative manner, for weeks, I finally took a few moments yesterday to submit my registration for the Aspen Summer Words conference.

And in fact, receiving the confirmation was no less pleasurable than the anticipation of looking ahead to registering had been. Assuming all goes as planned and I depart in six weeks for the Aspen Writers Festival summer event, it will be my third time there. And I can’t wait. It’s always an amazing opportunity; I’m still a little bit astounded to think I’m going to experience it yet again.

In general, I’m not a big proponent of writers’ conferences. I get my best writing done sitting at my kitchen table or at the library. When I gave a talk on writing a couple of months ago, one thing I said to the audience was “Don’t tell yourself you’ll write the book once you finally have the chance to spend a month in complete solitude in a windswept cottage on the coast of Maine. Most likely that will never happen, and even if it did, you don’t really need that. Writing at its best should be a regular part of daily life, not something you have to move heaven and hell in order to be able to get done.”

All true, which is why I myself don’t dream of weeks of solitude for writing. But the Aspen conference never lets me down. It’s a full week of conferences, workshops, panels, lectures, and discussions; even better, it’s a week surrounded by other people who love writing. They are writers at all levels: hugely successful novelists, freelancers like me who get paid to write but still believe they have yet to hit their stride, and some who are newcomers to the dream of writing, taking part in the conference as a way to get their very first poems or stories out of their heads and onto paper.

Both times I’ve gone before, I’ve met such a wide variety of people and had so many interesting discussions with them. I’ve learned a lot, too. For me, the best way to hone my writing is to work at it, but I learn other things, separate from the craft of writing, at the conference. I learn about the industry, and new directions in publication. I find out about up-and-coming authors. I hear poetry read aloud. I find out what kinds of experiences other writers have had with first-time publication.

So I consider myself extremely lucky to be planning a return trip this summer. Clicking on the “register” button yesterday filled me with a sense of joyful anticipation. Most of the year, I write in relative solitude; not on a windswept island but at my desk or kitchen table. Once a year, it’s wonderful to spend five days surrounded by colleagues, and so once again, I’m counting down the days ‘til departure.

Working at writing: It's all about how you spend your time

I’ve been to only a small number of writers’ conferences. Still, this article by writer/editor A. Victoria Mixon about when to be skeptical made me smile, because it reminded me not only of conferences but also of all the adult ed classes on writing that I used to take when I was in my twenties, and, to some extent, what I now sometimes say when people ask me about writers’ groups.

The pitfall that all of these things – conferences, classes, writers’ groups – have in common is that before you spend your time and/or money on them, you have to ask yourself this: Will I get more out of this experience than I’ll gain if I spend the same amount of time at my desk (or favorite armchair or Starbucks table or treehouse) writing?

Because really, that’s what I’ve learned in the twenty years since college, approximately half of which I spent trying to become a published writer and the other half, the ten years since, I’ve spent actually getting work published. Time you spend writing is almost always more valuable than time you spend listening to other people talk about writing, because if my experience is any indicator, writing is really more than anything about practice.

Moreover, there are people whose advice you should listen to when it comes to writing if you want to get published, but they are not friends or instructors; they are editors, and not just any editors but the editor of the publication you are writing for, or trying to write for, or hoping to write for. I’m a regular contributor to the Boston Globe. In my early adulthood, I took a variety of adult ed classes that, since they were offered in Boston and were on the topic of freelance journalism, might as well have been called “How to Write for the Boston Globe.”

Nothing I learned in those five years has been as useful to me as three or four cumulative conversations with one of the many editors at the Globe who has edited one of my stories. They know what they want, and over the years, I’ve learned how to write what they want. That’s not to say it’s the only way to do it, but this is a situation where practical application is so much more valuable than a theoretical approach. I learned how to write for the Globe by, well, writing for the Globe. And I got my foot in the door not by polishing my skills in writing classes but by sitting at my desk coming up with story ideas and eventually finding some that the Globe wanted.

With conferences, the issue is a little different, but my impression has often been that writers who attend conferences squander a lot of time talking about writing when they could be practicing it. The exception for me was the one time I took an admissions-based workshop at a conference. It wasn’t that we were necessarily more talented writers than any twelve members of an open-enrollment conference session; it was just that each of us had to submit a writing sample from a project we had under way in order to be accepted, and the fact that we were working on a specific project meant that the conversation was more targeted than the typical free-for-all discussions at conferences in which participants asking speakers unhelpful questions like “Where do you get your ideas?” (Really, if you have to ask that, you probably shouldn’t even be attending a writers’ conference.)

Writers’ groups are another issue. I belong to one very large group of freelancers, but it’s a networking group, not a critique group. We meet a few times a year for socializing and sometimes to hear a speaker talk about a very specifically targeted topic like writing for the web or writing a screenplay. It’s useful because the information is so specific. I haven’t joined a critique group in many, many years because as valuable as the insights of other writers can be, it’s again a matter of weighing the time you commit to the group against the time you could be writing. In writers’ groups, not only do you spend time at the meetings; you commit to reading other people’s work in between meetings, and the more group members you have, the more time that involves.

Yes, it’s true that over the years I’ve learned from conference presenters, writing colleagues, panelists, authors, and all kinds of other external sources, but ultimately, nothing has taught me as much about writing as sitting at my desk writing has. And nothing has taught me as much about how to get published as talking to an editor who is potentially willing to publish my work.

Writing conferences can be a great diversion, when a diversion is what you need. But for the most part, in my experience, succeeding at writing is about outlining ideas, writing copy, revising drafts. No money, no registration, no applications, no travel. Just sit down and write, and you’re taking the best steps possible for your career as a writer.