The conference sign-up goes out in October. Fifteen-minute slots, two o'clock to seven, two days. The early afternoon fills within about six hours of the link going live and the six o'clock slots go last, and there are always four or five families who do not sign up at all.
In my first years I read that sheet as a document about which parents cared. I would like to say I knew better. I did not; I remember thinking it, in those words, in a staff room, about a specific family.
Here is what I think the sheet is actually a document about.
Signing up at two in the afternoon requires a job you can leave, or no job, or a job with a supervisor you can ask. Signing up at six requires childcare for the younger ones, because the school does not provide it during conferences, and a car or a bus that runs at that hour. Signing up at all requires seeing the email within the first day, which requires being the kind of person whose phone is not in a locker for eight hours.
None of that is about caring. All of it is about the shape of a week.
And then the school does something with the sheet that I want to describe carefully, because it is the part that lasts. The parents who come become the parents we know. We have faces for them and we have had a conversation about their child that went beyond the report card. When a decision comes up later — a placement, a referral, whether to push on something — those are the families where the conversation is easy to start, because it is a continuation. The others are a cold call, and cold calls get made when there is time, and there is not time.
So a scheduling artefact becomes a relationship, and a relationship becomes an advantage, and by fourth grade the advantage looks like a fact about the family.
The defence of the current arrangement is not weak and I have made it in meetings. Teachers have their own children and their own evenings, and conferences already run into unpaid time that nobody counts. Extending the window to nine at night, or adding a Saturday, is asking a workforce that is already leaking people to give up more, and the people it would ask most from are the younger teachers with small children, who are exactly the ones leaving. Anyone proposing a fix has to say who pays for it, and in every proposal I have seen, the answer was us, unstated.
What I do now costs nothing and I offer it without any claim that it is a solution. I call the four or five. Not to reschedule — to have the conference on the phone, in eight minutes, at whatever hour they say, including once at nine forty on a Sunday night from a break room with a machine running behind her. I take the same notes I take in the room.
Eight minutes on a phone is worse than fifteen minutes in person and I would not pretend otherwise. It is enormously better than the nothing it replaced, and the difference it makes is not in the eight minutes. It is that in February, when I need to say something harder, I am not a cold call.
The family I thought that thing about in the staff room: the father worked a rotating shift at a distribution center and the mother had the younger two. He knew exactly how his son was doing. He knew more precisely than I did about the reading, and he told me so on the phone, politely, and I have not forgotten the politeness.
