What a relief: a whole semester got through without the pandemic cutting it short.
The exam was on the 12th. After that, the kids went back to school for three days in that half-hearted, just-get-it-over-with way. Then on Friday, the teacher announced that anyone who could take the day off should do so, and the parent meeting would be held online at 7 p.m.
The homeroom teacher, as always, was blunt and efficient. She spent about 10 minutes summing up the semester and did not say a single bad word about the kids. Then she used another five minutes to talk about the math course she taught. The main point was that this time the exam was a simulated transition to middle school: the papers were scanned and graded electronically. She especially flagged two issues — handwriting on the paper and unit conversion. That was it.
She has the right to be that confident. The two classes she teaches ranked first and second in the grade average. The only slight regret was that her own class fell behind the other one by less than 0.2 points. The “real mom” lost to the “stepmom.” Of course, her daughter is in the neighboring class, so it is hard to say which side she really favors.
The holiday assignment was reduced to one sentence: the paper version was with the children, the digital version had already been sent to the group chat, and anything that needed to be handed in after school was marked with a red circle.
I glanced at the clock. It was 7:19 p.m.
Then the Chinese teacher came on.
She started by announcing the scores and emphasized that the highest score in the class was 98.5, which was the second highest in the entire school. One multiple-choice answer about a conjunction was controversial; if that one were counted as correct too, it would have been a deserved first place for the whole grade.
At that moment, someone’s mic was still on, and a voice suddenly blurted out: “What’s the point? The average is still dead last.”
After that, the teacher’s repeated reminders for parents to mute themselves sounded strangely distorted.
I checked the participant list and found that the homeroom teacher had quietly slipped away.
Then came the familiar postmortem of the test paper.
Basically, everything had been taught: the basics had been covered, in-class reading had been covered, methods for extracurricular reading had been covered, and even the techniques for writing character portraits in essays had been covered. If your score was still that low, you were just letting me down.
Then came the lecture on class discipline: your class is noisy, you don’t respect me, I’ve been a homeroom teacher for so many years and this is my first time teaching a subject class, and you still bully me. You’re letting me down.
Then the homework complaints: I assign so much every day, and your parents don’t even look at it, so I have to grade everything by myself. You’re letting me down.
At that point, a soft voice from somewhere in the background muttered, “Didn’t the education bureau say teachers aren’t supposed to assign homework to parents?”
The Chinese teacher started coughing hard.
“Student A, the one who failed, I criticized you and you even dared to raise your middle finger at me. See? Exactly as expected. You’re letting me down.”
“Student B, the one who failed, you sang songs with your deskmate in class. Exactly as expected. You’re letting me down.”
(I really wanted to know how many points the deskmate got.)
“Student C, the one with 60 points, your homework was like this and like that. Before the exam I specifically told your parents to practice this and that, and all your parent could reply was: ‘Got it.’ It felt like my kindness was thrown back in my face.”
(What was I supposed to do, write a long post and put it on Weibo?)
“Student D, the one with 60 points, you finished your homework on time every single day, but you never once took the initiative to do extra practice. Not one extra word. How is that supposed to work?”
Anyway, she dragged each person out one by one and scolded them.
Twice during all this she said, “I just want to communicate with all the parents. If anyone is getting sleepy, you can go to bed.”
Well, damn it — who would dare, with her in that mood?
At 9:53 p.m., she finally got it all off her chest and abruptly declared the meeting over.