Open House. Stop wasting our time. And yours.

Back in the day, after you were in school for a  few weeks or even a month,  you had Back to School Night.

Your teachers would have you make some cute stuff and have it hanging on bulletin boards and placed on the desks for the parents to look at.

There wasn’t email, or the internet, or cell phones, so parents would receive a decent amount of information they couldn’t otherwise get on this night.

Inevitably, the parents would want to talk to the teacher about how their kid was doing.

And the night turned into a bunch of mini conferences for the teacher.

Eventually Back to School Night morphed into Open House.

And Open House gradually got closer and closer to the beginning of the school year.

That way the teachers wouldn’t have time to have the kids make anything special, and they could say they hadn’t had a chance to get to know your child well enough to discuss specifics.

And now with texting and websites and instant access to everything, there isn’t much that you can’t figure out instantaneously.

There isn’t really a whole lot of new information the school presents to you on Open House.

And so, Open Houses have pretty much become a formality.

With five children currently enrolled in the public school system ranging from kindergarten to eleventh grade, I can estimate that in the past ten years, I have attended roughly twenty-five Open Houses.

At this point, I consider myself to be an expert.

And in my expert opinion, Open Houses are a total waste of time.

At least the first half hour is.

In my town, anyway.

So I have some suggestions for improving these Open Houses so that they actually benefit the people who both run them, and attend them.

You know, since I’m an expert.

I don’t know how things work in other towns, but in my town, the first half hour of Open House is a big lecture given by an administrator.

If we are going to be honest, there isn’t much useful information presented during that time.

And as a result, no one is really listening.

In fact, last night at Number 5’s Open House while the principal was talking, my husband and I were looking around at the other parents in the room.

I saw more than one person nodding off.

And one of them was standing up.

Not exactly a good sign.

Now Open House is pretty much the only time you will have such a large percentage of the students’ parents in your building at once.

So why waste that time?

You have a captive audience!

Well, you would, if you didn’t bore them to death.

Don’t go over all that crap we can find online!

Don’t talk just for the sake of talking.

Why not be productive?

Why not go over some stuff that makes parents want to rip their hair out when they don’t have a clue how to help their kids?

Common Core isn’t going anywhere in the next year or two. Or ten.

Why don’t you use that first half hour to teach the three most misunderstood or confusing parts of Common Core to the parents so that they don’t want to fucking kill themselves when the worksheets about Tyrone and how many boxes he’s got altogether come home?

Why don’t you model the different strategies you are looking for kids to use when they are solving problems? What makes a good answer and what makes a bad one?

Why not go over that stuff?

Rather than wasting our time,

and yours,

why not make the most of it?

After all, that’s exactly what we would expect from Tyrone.

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