“Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot (2003) has written eloquently about how intimidated many parents feel when they come into their children’s classrooms for conferences with teachers. She explained that the sights, smells, and sounds of school, the small chairs, the authority of the teacher-all these elements transport many parents to their own childhood schooling experiences, some of which may have been unpleasant or fightening.” -Fabienne Doucet

I chuckled out loud when I read this quote from Doucet’s “(Re)Constructing Home and School: Immigrant Parents, Agency, and the (Un)Desirability of Bridging Multiple Worlds,” because it explains perfectly what I experienced/felt when I met with 6th grade parents for the first time at Parent-Teacher Conferences last week. I noticed when speaking to some parents about their child’s performance in Spanish class as being good, the parents would later questioned my opinion and felt that wasn’t true at all. I didn’t necessarily understood where the lack of disbelief was coming from until some parents began to talk about their own experiences of taking Spanish in middle/high school and how it was a really hard subject for them to learn. That’s when I finally understood where the disbeliefs were coming from.

One parent in particular stood out for me when he asked his son to leave the classroom so he could have a chat with my CT and I alone and was begging us to give ways to force his son to speak Spanish outside of school. I told the parent that his son participates a lot and is always the first one to arrive in class and even runs up to the whiteboard to be the first one to answer the trivia question of the day. His parents, especially, his father didn’t buy the fact that his son could truly be interested in learning Spanish because he doesn’t show any interests at home. His father consistently kept comparing himself to his son when he was his age and even went as far as telling us how he never took Spanish seriously until now and he doesn’t want his son to miss out on an amazing opportunity. My CT had to calmly say to him that “you can’t force your son to do something, if he doesn’t want to. We, his teachers, need to be the ones to light a fire inside of him and push him pass his limits, not you because you could potentially push him away and make him rebel against your wishes.”

It makes for an awkward and uncomfortable situation when you, the teacher, come in contact with parents for the first time and you’re not sure what to expect as well as not being sure what the family dynamic is like at home. I felt like some of the parents were disconnected and not truly listening to what the teachers had to say about their child whether is be good or bad in Spanish and simply were too focus on comparing their academic themselves when they were younger to their kids. It’s a difficult task bridging the two worlds togther, but it is something that has to be done to avoid further miscommunication and mistrust between parents and teachers.