Parent Number One accosts me as I’m going to my car to get a change of clothes, half an hour before Parent Night.  She starts screeching at me about the class her daughter has been put in.  I am not her child’s teacher– have, in fact, never had either of her children in my class– and couldn’t change her child’s class if my career depended on it.  She also doesn’t want the daughter in question to be in my class.  I’m not sure why it’s my problem at all, to be honest; this literally has nothing to do with me at all and once I tell you who to bring your problem to our conversation ought to be over.  Further elaboration isn’t doing either of us any good and is wasting my time.  I need every second between now and Parent Night actually starting.  She ends the conversation– well, technically, I do, by saying I have to go and leaving– by suggesting that her daughter is in the class she’s in because they’re “giving all the goddamn poor kids vouchers,” which makes exactly as much sense as you think it does.

Conversation with Parent Number Two starts well, but then veers off into crazytown.  I had her daughter in sixth grade and got along with her well; Mom starts complaining about her daughter’s troubles with her fifth grade teacher and then segues immediately into how she was personally responsible for getting our previous principal fired.  I gently suggest that our principal was chosen by the school board to take over and improve a school that was in substantially worse shape than ours was; I leave out the fact that they nearly doubled his salary when he moved, that he’s currently the highest-paid principal in the corporation, or that they’ve literally (and I’m not misusing this word) given him anything he wanted in his new position, which is a somewhat idiosyncratic definition of fired.  Mom assures me that she knows the right people and has influence in the right places.  I think to myself that I’d like to get fired the same way he did.  Carte blanche and twice the money sounds just horrible.

I walk into a conversation Parents Three and Four are having with another teacher so that I can introduce myself; they haven’t come down to my room and there’s not much time left in the Open House and I’d like to speak with everyone I can.  I walk into what turns into an extended ten-minute rant about how another student in the same grade as their child “mercilessly bullied” their son on the bus “every day” all last year and no one ever did anything about it.  The following are facts:  1) I know both children involved; 2) They provided an accurate physical description of the bully, so I know that this is not a case of mistaken identity; 3) I am the bus supervisor for the entire building and every single accusation of any form of misconduct on the bus comes through me before any administrator sees it; I heard nothing of this situation from anyone involved at any point last year, despite multiple conversations with the accused child’s bus driver about that child; 4) The two students do not ride the same bus and never did; 5) the bully in question spent most of the last half of the year on half-days and during that time arrived at school at 8:30 or so and left by 11:45– in other words, he never rode the bus at all for nearly the entire second semester.

This story cannot possibly be true.

Furthermore, the two boys were in different classes and would, to the best of my knowledge, have had rare chances to encounter each other during the school day.  (I will admit I can think of one way in which that statement may not be true; the numbered items above are indisputable.)  I spend a few minutes wondering if these people know that they’re lying or if they’re far enough gone that they’ve convinced themselves this impossible tale is true.  I reflect on the number of stories you see and hear about vicious bullying in schools that “no one ever did anything about,” and the number of times I’ve been directly accused of same, under similar circumstances, and briefly consider quitting my job.

Parent Five pulls into the parking lot as I’m walking out of the building.  Parent Night has ended at 6:30; it is 6:40.  She has her son, a fifth-grader–the youngest grade in our school– with her.  I tell her that the Open House has ended and that she is not going to be allowed into the building.  She starts off very angry, but calms down as I talk her and her son through the procedure that we’ll be following in the morning.  I tell him my name, make him repeat it a couple of times, and show them what door to drop him off at and make sure he knows where to go when he gets inside the school and that they both understand what time they’re supposed to be there.  I tell him to come find me when he gets into the gym and that I’ll show him where he’s supposed to sit, and answer a few other questions from her about other things that will happen during the day and how much interaction he’ll be having with the seventh and eighth graders, a subject she seems especially tense about.  By the end of the conversation, she’s smiling and the boy actually tells me he’s excited about school tomorrow before they drive off.  As they leave, I realize that I never actually got his name.  No worries; he says goodbye as they pull out and repeats my name back to me.

I suppose it could have gone worse.