Teachers. What's the worst parent-teacher conference you've ever had?

I had a student fail my class, and I thought I'd been emailing with their parents throughout the semester.

Turns out the parents didn't speak English and relied on their children to translate for them.

Their older sibling was studying abroad, so the student was able to hide everything from the parents.

Once they came home, the jig was up.

The parents couldn't believe their

child had lied for months, so he had a face-to-face meeting. It was so awful to see their faces

crumble in shame and humiliation as their oldest child translated the meeting. I teach seventh grade,

and the one that stands out to me was from my second year in the classroom. Probably it sticks out in my

mind because I didn't feel confident in my job yet. So this interaction I had with the family

threw me for a loop. Once, I had a struggling student come in with their family, and I was so eager to

talk to this family. I was hoping that we could have some kind of constructive conversation that would

lead to the kid's improvement in my class. I'd pulled up their

grades to explain why he had a D in my class and what he needed to work on to bring his grade up.

Next thing I knew, parents started completely berating the kid, calling him stupid and lazy, and telling

him that he was a failure. It was horrible. Even worse, the kid was on the spectrum, so he really

didn't have the kind of emotional stability

to handle something like that.

Heck, I don't know what seventh grader would be able to handle something like that.

He started crying and his parents apologized to me, to me, and led him out into the hallway

where they continued to berate him.

It was rough.

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