A day at the PTM!

Uninspired happenings around the globe sent this blog into hibernation. Two back to back Parent teacher meetings resurrected the dead writer in me. Parent Teacher Meetings or PTM’s as I will be addressing them, are a source of enlightenment for parents more than the suspects (students) in question.

By virtue of the 7 year age difference between my elder daughter and the younger one I find myself to be privileged to exchange views (mostly not exchange, just accept) and rub shoulders with the crème de la crème representing the parents from two diverse generations . For the ease of understanding let’s call them the Pre Google Era and the Post Google Era parents.

Attending the younger one’s PTM, who is in 4th grade is always a challenge as I find myself in the company of Post Google era parents. I always accompany my wife to these PTM’s. My role along with the other not so better halves is securing a place in the meandering queue in front of the class room. The better of the halves indulge in constructive conversations which borders on topics ranging from the reforms in the Indian educational system to lamenting the loss of an angelic human resources campaigner who would have supported their cause at the national level. My role as I said earlier is simply to look through the people passing by take a step forward as the person in front takes one and exchange not so educative forwards with my forty something school boys group on Whatsapp. Well, since I was also a parent of a 10th grader, I had that been there, seen this, done that, aura around me.
This time though, I entertained myself to what is otherwise a boring ritual by eavesdropping into the deep intellectual conversations, the flag bearers of the Indian educational system were indulging in around me. One was frantically waving an answer sheet not knowing why a letter was asked to be written to the grandfather instead of the uncle while the other said why letter writing was considered important in an era of emails. That lady had a point. By the next PTM they would be discussing ‘y a chld shld not LOL whn de see a clown’. The English pundits would be ‘RITGs’, for the uninitiated, I made that up…It just means Rolling in Their Graves!!! Well this was coming from a generation of parents who frequently use the non-existent word ‘Bestest’ which might well find its way into the next version of Oxford dictionary considering its extensive use thereby adding an additional degree of comparison which I might call the ‘Hyperlative’. Another was questioning the teaching methods employed in explaining the concept of Associative property and waving out a Maths answer sheet of an 8 Year old which needed to be upgraded from a B1 to an A2. Never have alpha numeric combination of the first 5 alphabets and the first 2 numerals found more importance. All this was happening when the actual stake holders of these discussions were blissfully playing among themselves an A1 hit a D2 and a B2 laughed in the company of a D1 oblivious to the war on ambitions that was being plotted in the back ground.

Day two with my 10th grader was a saner affair since I was mostly in the company of the Pre-Google Era parents. We exchanged stuff like the number of times our parents had visited school or the oil price of the day or even discussed the possibility of who amongst us will be fired first in these bad oil days. The talk of NEET, NATA, JEE, IIT, BITS, NITS also did the rounds. There were the anxious-ones, the resigned-to-the-fate ones and still-the-pushy-ones, the forefathers of the ones I saw a day earlier at the 4th grade PTM.

We are in an era where obsessive compulsive parenting, the members of which are the proponents of the rat race by imposing martial laws at home and infringing on the fundamental right to information by denying access to any kind of media, like television, tabs, phones etc. The liberals are the pariahs of parenting who think they are actually punishing their kids by asking them to watch Arnob’s News Hour.

A small fraction of the off springs go on to prove that the pariahs were not wrong while a larger percentage prove that martial law implementing parents were right all along thereby making the sceptical liberals like me look like idiots. The only hope parental pariahs like me have is that, life is not all about the school grades alone.