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Mike: It was about the third or fourth week of my first year teaching.
The principal came and let me know that a parent had come to her . . .
requesting to have his student pulled out of my classroom.
Margaret: Oh no . . .
I was hurt and confused . . . I thought I was doing a great job for a first-year teacher.
She had an older brother who was ten months older, who was also in fourth grade,
right across the hall in another classroom, and he had been getting math homework every night
for the first few weeks of school, and I don't think I'd sent home any homework yet, so the parent perception was
that I wasn't challenging the students and I wasn't teaching a whole lot.
So I had to, in my fourth week of teaching as a twenty-two-year-old,
figure out how to have a conversation with a parent who was not happy
about what was going on in my classroom.
Margaret: Twenty-two years old?
Mike: Yeah . . . and I had worked with parents before, when I was coaching
swim teams or working as a summer camp counselor but this was a very different kind of setting,
and I would have just liked a little bit of advice and coaching around how to
interact with parents, in a good way.
Margaret: It's funny, because for me, that was the one piece, because I came to teaching as my second career . . .
So I had already in my first career had a lot of dealings with adults, so,
actually dealing with parents was the part that when we started these books
I felt like I had the most to say about that
and that was the chapter I was most excited about writing and most proud of when we finished
because I felt like, "Okay this is the one thing I know how to do" from the outset.
I sort of had that piece. So for me that chapter
in the book I was most excited to write
and really proud of how that piece turned out.