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Confession: I am slightly obsessed with Judge Judy Sheindlin. Maybe it’s her no-nonsense attitude or that gargantuan confidence packed into a petite, lace-collared, loud-mouthed frame. But I like her ability to make things right, set people straight, and say it like it is. And despite that fact that her show has recently been cancelled after 25 years, I still watch the reruns. A lot. Like, almost every day. In just a one half-hour time slot, this tiny titan of daytime television fixes the small injustices of our world.
The Truth Machine
There are times in my life when I could use a Judge Judy. A self-proclaimed “truth machine,” her Honor sees though people and their excuses in a nanosecond. Nowhere is this more evident than with cases that involve problematic teenagers and their blindly hoodwinked parents. Unlike Judy, I don’t believe every teen is a liar. (“Do you know how to tell when a teenager is lying? When their lips are moving.”) But I do believe that some teens will twist the truth, at times to the point of it being almost unrecognizable. And that is quite often when you get the phone call or the email from the tragically duped, occasionally indignant parent. (“But MY son said that YOU…”)
That’s precisely the time I’d like to invite Judge Judy to the parent-teacher conference.
The Conference
Most of the time I am bursting with empathy for the student in one of these conferences. Imagine sitting in a cold, white room with your parents, the table lined with every teacher you have, along with a guidance counselor, perhaps an administrator, all of them staring you down, leaning in to hear how you are going to fix yourself, with the theme of the meeting: THE PROBLEM WITH ME. How awful. Really.
Oftentimes, I just want to scoop the kid up and give him or her a hug, and say, “You are ok, sweetie.” But then there are those moments when it is THAT kid, the one who hasn’t handed in a lick of work all quarter and, for the life of him, can’t understand why he has a 23 in your class; the one whose blatant disrespect and bad attitude threaten to spread like cancer in your classroom; the the one who, when given a lunch detention or referral, retorts with the menacing remonstrance, “But I’ll call my mom.”
And you can pretty much bet, considering the whole apple-tree theory, that THAT kid will bring in THAT parent. The one who believes it’s everyone else’s fault but their child’s.
Student–and Parent–Accountability
Oh, Judge Judy, how I would love for you to attend such a conference. I can picture you sitting in the corner with your black robe and your little lace collar, raising an eyebrow over your rectangular spectacles with a stern grimace. “You better stop making excuses for Timmy,” she would caution mom and dad, “or he will end up in jail.” She would talk about how, in her day (heck, in my day), if students got a note home about their misbehavior, they would cry. They would tremble at the thought of coming home to experience the wrath of their parents, who would be 100% behind the teacher. The last thing the parents would do would be blame the teacher, she would add; they would instead hold the student accountable. And the student would learn something from it. “Stop making excuses for your son,” she would admonish as the conference concluded, “you are not doing him any favors.”
Ah, if only. For so many reasons, such straight talk rarely happens. In the meantime, we do the best we can as teachers and as parents. Luckily, most parents are lovely, conscientous people who only want the best for their children. Even THAT parent (“You are being outrageous. Out-RAY-geous!”) is guilty out of love. But we could all “put on our listening ears,” as the judge says (“God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason”), and learn a few lessons from her about responsibility and accountability. As teachers and parents, we should stand together to fight this culture of finger-pointing. Let’s stop robbing our kids of these opportunities for social and moral growth. We are only hurting our children, and ultimately our society, by continuing to make excuses for them.