“My relationship with parents helps me feel happy (...) because I see that it's working well, that they understand what the children are doing. I get very little feedback from parents about material or organizational problems. I tell myself that this means that the way I organize homework, for example—they have to understand it pretty well, they have to be able to figure it out.”
“Something I also benefit from is a system on the part of the school where we don't have to have direct electronic contact with all the parents. I have a WhatsApp group with just two parent representatives and they forward information to the other parents.”
“The first year, I received requests from these parent representatives every two weeks. This year, it's perhaps once every month and a half, and it's often me who has a message for the parents. There's a school trip, there's an activity, for example, there's something I need to tell them. But (...) I communicate very, very little on this WhatsApp group—as little as possible—and I don't know what the parents say to each other (...) I don't know and I don't try to find out.”
“I know that the school principal (...) when he meets with parents, he asks them: ‘How are things going? Is everything okay?’ And if there were a problem, he would tell me. So, if he doesn't say anything (...) no news is good news.”
“The principal also gave me some advice, saying: ‘If you plan homework well in advance—it's a big source of frustration for parents on the weekends if they have to try to figure out what exactly their child has to do—if you organize things properly, [everything will be easier for you].’ For many of the instructions I give for assignments, I have this little voice in my head saying: ‘If I were a parent and I picked up my child's notebook, what would I understand about what my child is doing, needs to do, or will do?’"
“When I assign books for my students to read, I always read the book quite carefully beforehand, asking myself how it might be interpreted by a parent who might say, ‘He has this or that political view,’ or ‘He's not right in the head,’ or ‘He's racist because the book is a bit outdated.’ And I pay attention to that to avoid finding myself in a difficult position in my relationship with the parents. I think I'm, on average, about fifteen years older than the parents, because they're mostly in their forties—between thirty-five and forty-five. I'm fifty-eight.”