Parent-teacher meetings and children's sadness.

(Baonghean) - At this time of year, if you see a few children with wrinkled faces like unironed clothes, there's no doubt the source of their distress can be summed up in three words: Parent-Teacher Meeting. I happened to (just happened to) find out that after that crucial moment, their bottoms are even more wrinkled than the gloomy faces they displayed. Who says children don't experience sadness?

Perhaps few events receive as much attention from children as parent-teacher meetings. From young to old, boys and girls, from poor students to high-achieving ones, from mischievous troublemakers to the most well-behaved, everyone shares the same feeling of nervousness and anxiety, like sitting on a hot coals, every time a parent-teacher meeting comes around. To give you an example, during my school years, I was a model of good behavior, yet I still got spanked regularly. The reasons: talking during class, eating snacks... basically, all sorts of silly things that nobody would believe. Why silly? Because, firstly, every student eats snacks and talks during class. Secondly, my friends were all spanked by their parents for a seemingly much more serious "crime": being a poor student.

To be fair, is being a poor student a "crime"? Not exactly, but it is. In a class of 30 students, there must be rankings from 1 to 30; how could there be a top student if there weren't any at the bottom? Rankings within a class, a grade level, or a school aren't absolute measures, because the very word "ranking" implies relative comparison. Almost everyone has been compared by their parents to the legendary "perfect child." The problem is, when that seemingly insignificant child wins medals and awards, you suddenly feel small and inadequate. The truth is, the problem isn't with you, but with your parents who use such a high and unrealistic frame of reference. For example, if you come in 11th place in a competition that selects the top 10 students, it doesn't mean you're bad; it just means you haven't chosen the right competition for yourself.

That's not to excuse the poor academic results of some people. If 29 out of 30 students in the class got a 7 and you got a 4, then the problem must be you. Are you lazy? Are you careless with your assignments? Come on, those are completely fixable, so a few spankings for your "laziness" are well deserved. It wasn't until much later that my mother confessed that every time she came home from a parent-teacher meeting, she'd embellish the "crimes" to make them seem more dramatic, adding a few more spankings to scare me. And it really worked, because every time a parent-teacher meeting came around, I'd obediently greet her from the gate, look at her expression, then voluntarily grab the spanking, climb into bed, pull down my pants, and lie face down. Thinking back, it still hurts!

Children also experience sadness, but it's usually only fleeting. The "parent-teacher meeting" effect lasts at most a week, then everything goes back to normal. And that's best, because children are like blank sheets of paper, their fleeting joy and sadness making them lively and adorable. Don't let parent-teacher meetings become a nightmare, leaving scars and tears on those sheets of paper, causing them to grow up with deep-seated insecurities and pressure in their hearts...

Hai Trieu

(Email from Paris)