LIFE BY LOUIS: The changing faces of parents' meetings in schools

I must recognise and appreciate all teachers for the work they do with our children. Barely nine months after joining Baby Class, Brian can write numbers one to 10, recite the whole alphabet and write half of it, draw a few things, and recognise several primary colours.

He can also sing a few English songs plus attempt the National Anthem – things that I learnt in Standard Four with varying degrees of success. I only started saying the full alphabet correctly the same day my voice broke and tiny hairs started showing up in my armpits.

It was not until I was well into high school that I could construct meaningful sentences and write a decent composition in English.

SCHOOL REPORTS

Last week as schools were opening, parents were summoned for a session with teachers. At the session, parents keenly peruse the last end of term answer sheets and report form in the presence of the child and their two teachers, discussing areas of strengths and weakness.

One area where we spent quite a substantial amount of time on was trying to understand why he was inverting the number 9 and confusing it with number 6. I went home with a recovery and improvement plan that included a rigorous set of exercises.

This academic review meeting came when we had barely recovered from an open day a few weeks before, where parents were taken through another long day of individual performance and improvement tracking.

All these were foreign terminologies in Karugo Group of Schools where the teachers forced us to carry maize seeds to school to use for counting; in the process depleting the national food reserves.

In the nine short months that I have been a parent at this school, I have survived two educational trips.

One was to Mamba Village, probably to help the Baby Class children learn about the crocodile’s nocturnal habits, its dental formula, amphibian nature and breeding habits.

The second was a train trip to Naivasha, perhaps to gain insights into the history of the railway line construction, locomotive internal combustion engines performance and the progress of the ongoing standard gauge railway.

SUMMONS

In my days, the only time parents were summoned to school was when their child had turned into a serial killer or was running an international drugs smuggling ring.

In short, the presence of a parent in the school was a rare occasion and was mostly associated with their child’s bad behaviour.

In such a case, the parent would be invited to the staff room and lent a stick to participate in disciplining their errant child. The teachers would, for the remainder of the school term, keep reminding you how bad a child you had become that you kept 'plucking' your parents from their busy schedules in the tea farms so they could come to school to address your misdeeds.

I still cannot imagine the look Wa Hellen would have given me had she been summoned to Karugo Group of Schools to collect a report form. First of all, she would have protested and questioned why that was necessary and why I could not bring it myself.

She would probably accept the invitation, albeit reluctantly, and send me off with a promise that she would collect it later in the day at her own time.

But, our parents’ refusal to collect the report forms in person worked in our favour.

Failing in a subject was a major crime. So, before you handed in the report form, you had to keenly peruse through and see if there was a subject where you had performed dismally.

If there was a score that was below 50 per cent, it was possible to 'persuade' it to turn into 75 per cent using an eraser and a pen. You could also massage your overall position in the class from an obscure position near the rear into a lucrative position in the top 10.

Report forms those days were like commission of inquiry reports. Getting the original and accurate ones from some pupils was like extracting a stubborn molar tooth.

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