school daze

This evening parents of grade 7 students of my daughter's school were invited to the very fancy gymnasium of the sport centre beside the school for a mass meeting with the principal.

Called for 6pm on a regular work day, just two days before a major holiday for which many are in the midst of preparations, the meeting should have been kept short and to the point. Instead, it started 15 minutes late (no surprise there) with a rambling dramatization and musical numbers by children no one knew and for which the parents within earshot had no patience. The applause was polite -- why make the children feel bad? -- but the audience was steaming with resentment at having been made to sit through the pontless presentation.

At 6:30 the principal finally started the meeting, but instead of getting to down to business, he chose to chide the parents who were too busy to show up. If you see the inanity of this, you'll know how we who did show up viewed him in that moment.

By the end of his two-hour tirade, those of us who had thought we might be missing something by not bothering knew we'd learned something vital: In future, avoid all meetings called by this man. There was not even a hint of polite applause when he finally shut up.

I speak Hebrew pretty well, but when I have to listen for long periods of time, or to people who are speaking unclearly in some way or are drowned out by the rustling or chatting of the audience, I lose a lot of information. In his case, because of some foreign (perhaps Romanian?) accent or speech mannerism, I understood approximately one word out of each phrase or sentence. Most of the time, I knew what he was talking about but had no idea what he was saying about it. The man needs to learn to write down those two hours' worth of directives to parents (stuff like: Take trips around the country with your children; Watch what they're doing online; Help even the kids who look like they don't need help; Make sure t-shirts cover bellies). Problem is, he apparently doesn't believe we'd read it. But half the parents knew not to come, so they didn't hear it anyway. Give us the readers digest version, man!! That means, in print!!

After that, we were still expected to spend another hour in our child's classroom listening to the homeroom teacher hold forth. She's a very professional, long-time teacher and she had important information to impart, not the generic stuff the principal went on about, but specific and pertinent to the current classroom situation. She should have had two hours to talk, and the bloody arrogant principal should have held us for 20 minutes, tops. I wish she hadn't used the old teacher's trick of talking very quietly in order to make people listen better; because of it, I missed much of what she had to say, and it was interesting. She turned on the air conditioning in the classroom, adding more ambient noise, and then every time someone went into their purse for a pen, or even whispered to the person beside them, I failed to catch her words. It was very frustrating.

This is what I got from this evening: Our kids are now 12, and we should be worried, scared, or at least very concerned. They will be lashed by the storms of adolescence, they will be buffeted by the demands of academia, and they are in danger of ending up at parties with no parents in attendance. It's terrifying.

Parenthood: the original extreme sport.