required mcpost: failure story

this is embarrassing; it's an effective assignment.

I am horrible at contacting parents. This is not to say that I’m horrible when I get in contact with parents; there are plenty of my student’s parents with whom I talk frequently (mostly because they’re around school a lot and/or drop by to say “hi” when they pick up their son/daughter), and with whom I seem to have a very cordial and productive relationship – at least as it pertains to the social/intellectual/educational development of their son/daughter. However, it’s often the case that those parents with whom I have excellent contact are those parents of my excellent students.

Take, for instance, CT and his mom (and his sister, and his aunt, for that matter). I see CT all the time; he’s one of the presidents of the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Club, and he participated in Jake and my Princeton Review course. CT is a talker. He thinks by talking and he learns by talking; a natural and incessant debater, whom I have taken to calling the “honorable CT,” and won’t be surprised if I see him in judge’s robes someday. As I’m not the one to shy from argument, CT and I (and Jake as well) often loose track of time carrying on dialogue that had just been inspired by whomever had just been by to speak to our club, or whatever issue we’re fixating on for the moment. So, CT’s mom, or sister, or aunt stop by to pick him up (they know exactly where Jake’s room is, and they know to look in my room if CT isn’t in Jake’s room with me), whereupon I sing CT’s praises about his dedication, maturity, intelligence, etc.; I seem to have been so convincing that when CT’s sister met my girlfriend Margaret, she (as Margaret writes) “wouldn't shake [her] hand, she insisted on hugging [her] because ‘Mr. Molina is like part of our family.’ [She said] every night at dinner CT talks about you.” While this seems more like a success story than a failure story, moments like this – while certainly supportive – often highlight for me how many parents and families I have no contact with.

I’m afraid to make phone calls home. I don’t know why, particularly. It has something to do with an uncomfortable feeling that I’m going to disturb someone, or that they’re going to dispute whatever negative or positive thing I have to say about my student/their child, or that perhaps they’re going to realize that there’s just a beard-faced kid on line who’s trying to pin together a thin charade of authority (“Mr. Molina” always feels the least appropriate on the telephone). It’s a weird fear of confrontation that I don’t seem to have when dealing with people face to face, or even dealing with people through the interchange of text, but which seems to feel so strong when it comes to telephones. I have no problem writing letters home to parents (though these are usually of the mass information sort) – and perhaps I should focus on communicating more through this channel next year – but there is something both necessary and frightening about calling someone’s house that I can’t seem to get over (though clearly I need to.) Last year I was always jealous of Jake when he told me stories of having certain parents on speed dial, on marathon calls to inform parent of missing work, and of successful preemptive calls home for those kids who he didn’t want to be a pain in the ass. Weeks would go by that I would write “begin parent contacts” or “call home for period 2A” or “call JF’s mom, call T’s mom, call JG’s dad,” and nothing would happen. This would be the bottom of my to-Do list, and I would almost always opt to get ahead of lesson planning and/or grading to what seemed like disturbing people’s households.

All of this is particularly frustrating/embarrassing in light of the fact that so many parents insisted that I call them if their student was ever slacking or acting up in my class. There are so many parents that deserved a quick check up or follow up throughout the year, and I neglected 95% percent of them. One particular case was JR – who will serve as a tragic counterexample to CT. JR suffered the entire year in my class, and it became clear even during parent-teacher conferences in the first quarter that this was an atypical performance for her. JR’s mother – like many others – gave me her contact information and insisted that I call her periodically to give updates, and anytime if she needed to be worried at all about JR’s grades. Well, JR coasted at a F to D grade level throughout the year; she rarely participated, she bombed tests every once in a while, she didn’t turn in homework, and she didn’t come to tutoring. Clearly, there were a million red flags for me to get the parents involved and try and figure out (a) if anything is going on outside school that I should know of, and (b) what we need to do to help JR perform at the level she’d previously been performing at. But, nothing happened. “Call JR’s mom” would often appear on my to-do list, but I’d never get to it. Eventually I was too embarrassed that I had never contacted her mother that I was even more embarrassed begin to contact her because she’d be angry at me for taking so long to get around to it.

Eventually, third term parent-teacher conferences rolled around, and JR’s mother showed up again. Apparently, JR had been going through some behavioral health issues the whole year, and while her mom had been reluctant to speak to me about them earlier in the year, it was clear by then that I needed to understand the gravity of the situation. By that point, JR’s grades hadn’t risen above a C, and apparently I was the only teacher of hers who hadn’t contacted home to give her mom updates on JR’s performance. Again, she made it clear that I needed to periodically update her concerning JR’s grade in my class, and call her even if JR missed any homework assignments. My embarrassment in these respects snowballed; I hung on to more positive an natural parent-teacher relationships (like with CT), and eventually gave up even writing down the need to call parents on my to-do list. JR failed to turn in plenty of homework between third term conferences and the end of the year. She barely passed Alg II.