Parent life / Accounts published in 2003 and 2009
Mum Teaches at Their School. The Reviews Come Home.
Teachers whose children attend their school get their day reviewed at teatime. I volunteer one morning a week. That is plenty.
In 2003 Dee Gilmour, a food technology teacher at South Bromsgrove High School, told Tes what her two sons, pupils there, brought home. Not their news. Hers. “They’ll come home and say ‘I heard you were in a bad mood today’, or ‘you really had a go at so-and-so’.” She felt she had to justify her actions. At her own table. To people she was about to feed.
I am not a teacher. I hear readers one morning a week at our youngest’s primary, on a chair built for a seven-year-old. I assumed this made me invisible.
By Wednesday teatime the youngest had heard that I did a voice for the dinosaur and told a Year 2 boy his bookmark was not a sword. Our daughter, in Year 5, had heard both, plus a third thing I had not done. I spent the fish fingers justifying my actions. The bookmark was a sword.
Professionals have systems. A Mumsnet teacher in 2009 had told her three daughters, pupils at her school, that if anyone said anything horrible about her, they should reply “try living with her”, which she called “guaranteed to diffuse any anger”. Her eldest had found the real perk: she could “tap me for tuck money”. In Teach Primary in 2024, a teacher who had taught each of her own three recalled being Mrs Mummy, “yes, it was their choice”.
Dee Gilmour, dreading accusations of favouritism, never put her son forward for anything; when the sixth form voted him house captain anyway, she almost felt she had to apologise.
I taught our daughter “try living with her”, for the dinosaur. It worked so well that she now uses it at home, on her father, about me.
Sources
- Janet Murray, When mum becomes Miss
- Mumsnet, parent teachers: can you work in the same school your child is in?
- Undercover Teacher, What's wrong with teaching your own child?, Teach Primary 18.8, p. 21
Notes from the School Gates is a light-hearted column: home scenes and family characters are invented; schools and public facts are real. About the column