Channeling Lynn Spears

Landing a 3-minute middle school parent/teacher conference in New York is akin to running with the bulls. Not everyone makes it to the finish line, and those who do hope simply to not be gored at the end. I grew up in the southwest, where competing for a limited number of 3-minute teacher conference slots is simply bizarre. But I am now a New Yorker with two children in the public middle school system and so I am becoming tougher by the year. Today I jumped in the parent/teacher conference competition for my son who is just starting his middle school career.

The hallways were crammed with worried parents who were shocked to see their star student kids come home with report cards that read “satisfactory” but not “excellent”. One boy reported that his parent slapped him upon seeing the report card. The hallway rumor mill reports that schools are graded on “improvement”, and therefore it is quite unusual to get an “excellent” in any subject in the first quarter.

While I was waiting in the long snaking line of parents anxious to speak to Ms. Quackenbush, the homeroom teacher, I asked other parents how they were able to take an afternoon off from work for about 9 total minutes of teacher interaction. The parent next to me explained that she is a professional personal lingerie shopper and therefore has a flexible schedule. She first evaluates her client’s existing lingerie collection, and then escorts them to some of New York’s finest underwear stores. Her results are transformative, which she credits to a course she took on “women studying pleasure”. I asked her why women had such a hard time buying underwear. She blamed a pitiful social environment that suppresses women’s abilities to feel good about themselves.

Nobody was interested in chatting with me while I waited for the science teacher (perhaps they had overheard the lingerie conversation and were frightened), so I read the packet of information handed to parents as we arrived. This small packet included a full page of safety advice for teens. They recommend that teens carry $10 in “escape money” so that if a cab driver starts acting bizarre you can toss ten bucks at him and jump out at a red light.

Apparently the public school authorities understand that you’ve got to be tough to be a New Yorker. Loretta graduated from middle school in the Bronx, which may explain her safety shrewdness. Just last week as I was leaving the office after dark she advised me to roll up my New York Times very tightly like a stick so I can shank any muggers in the throat if attacked. And then she added as an aside, run like hell afterwards because the mugger will be very angry. I am pretty sure that Loretta has never seen the New York Times used in this way, and I’m very sure that if I am mugged I will politely turn over my ipod.

It’s tough being a stage Mom – even if you are an education stage Mom where the goal is far, far from celebrity-dom. There is a lot of waiting around. I read Lynn Spear’s autobiography to see if I could learn some things that might put stage Mom-ing to good causes. There are some bizarre moments in the book – like when she nearly sent her teen daughter to a Christian home for unwed pregnant teens and instead brought her to New York on a vacation where they snuck in to the movie theatre to watch “Juno.” Mostly it seems that Lynn Spears transported Britney and her sister to lots of extra curricular activities, and waited around. Plus, when she could, she got pushy.

The first time I ran with the bulls was for my daughter, when parents began assembling an hour ahead of the scheduled conference time outside the school doors in the bitter November wind. At exactly noon the principal threw open the doors and parents ran – literally – up the five flights of stairs to the middle school floor. Some parents got winded by floor three and slowed down or stopped to take off their jackets, but the more fit parents just ran past them. Finally, my gym membership had really paid off. Once on the fifth floor, the trick was to run from classroom to classroom and sign up for a meeting, and then race back and forth through the hallways to check your status on the call sheets. The most entertaining meeting was with the gym teacher, who stopped me in the hallway and said “You are Mia’s Mom, I guarantee you that you are Mia’s Mom…” and then led me to his desk where he talked non stop for the entire three minutes, ending with “No matter what happens, Mia’s team won the 6th grade volleyball championships and you can never take that away from her. She served the winning point, did she tell you that? Nope, nobody can ever take that away from her. Never.”

A few weeks ago while shopping for high schools at the borough fair, I switched gears and started asking hard questions, like whether the school environment was gay friendly. One guidance counselor became flustered, claiming “I can’t know what everyone is thinking” and told me the story of how a few years ago a student “had a parent situation like mine” but problems were averted because “only one of them came with her at a time to the school, they didn’t ever come together.” A few guys from the performing arts schools were gleeful to be asked and begged me to choose their school.

It was far more satisfying to engage in a discussion about creating an empowering and respectful educational environment rather than focusing on whether or not my kid should have received an “excellent” grade instead of the less glamorous “satisfactory.” Loretta has told me to stop harassing public workers, but I couldn’t help myself. I called my daughter’s school principal and asked her what she is doing to make sure there isn’t gender bias in the classroom. They have ramped up their ballroom dancing curriculum, but the girls outnumber the boys so my daughter has been assigned the role of a “boy”. I asked the principal what she intended to do about the fact that the dance program reinforced the role of boys as leaders and girls as followers. Couldn’t she have simply assigned my daughter to the role of “leader”, instead of forcing a gender switch? And isn’t it possible that two girls might someday want to ballroom dance together? In a month where gay marriage just became legal in Connecticut, shouldn’t these kids be able to imagine a groom and groom waltzing?

Unfortunately, after about three minutes, the principal was called away to an emergency meeting in the middle of our phone conversation.