Conferences and Evaluations

Today we had our second of three parent-teacher conferences for the kids. We were told that both of our kids are doing "S" and "G" work, and that they are doing great in their respective classrooms. More on that in a minute.

As we went into our second conference of the morning, the teacher was returning with a box of tissues. I thought maybe she had a cold, but she made a comment that implied that some of the parents she'd met with already had been crying during the conferences.

Oof. It's tough enough to manage a classroom of five-year-olds, but how do you deal with parents who break down while discussing their kids? How unpleasant would that be? It makes me very glad to be an engineer, I'll say that.

On to grading - or should I say, "evaluation." They don't grade any more. Maybe later actual grades will be handed out but for now, the kids are evaluated (not graded) against a four level scale - U, S, G, O. These are not grades but they stand for Unsatisfactory, Satisfactory, Good, and Outstanding. "S" is considered to be "grade level work" and much was made of this at the first conference. I suppose every parent thinks their child is Outstanding, so the teachers spent a lot of time trying to calibrate our expectations to "S=Okay."

Anyway - even though U, S, G, and O appear to map well to the more familiar F, C, B, and A, I'm sure this similarity between "evaluations" and "grades" is strictly coincindental. Really.