Back to School Night is a lot like being in a strip club
For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, people spill their guts to me within a few minutes of saying hello. It makes for some awkward situations when, after a few minutes, people confess to a predilection for pickles or a passion for pussycats. At Back To School night at my daughter’s high school, I had one teacher tell me how painfully shy he was and how he really does not like being a teacher and another who told me she preferred to be at home rather than talking to parents at back to school night.
I had a stripper tell me the same thing while I was at a DC strip club. It was a seedier space, they served women’s breasts and chicken wings starting at 10:00 am, a mark of a less than classy joint. Wearing nothing but a neon-colored g string and 4-inch platform plastic shoes, the stripper confessed to just wanting to be home instead of faking for a bunch of paunchy semi-sober men.
For the record, I was there at the only socially appropriate hour and in a semi-inebriated condition, late on a Saturday night with a bunch of guys from my beach house. Showing up stone sober anytime before 9 pm is just not acceptable. Weekends only, unless you are traveling, then only Thursday night or maybe a Wednesday but it is still dicey.
I think the beach house boys, we're trying to treat me like one of the guys. It was nice to feel included but strip bars for me are boring. The only thing that ever happened to me is paying too much for drinks and the dancers spill their sad stories when I run into them in the bathrooms. Strippers don’t perform for me, because they know that I know they are faking it.
The stripper, we will call her by my own stage name DooMe Moore, was blunt: She hated having to perform for the patrons, looking them dead in the eye and pretending to be totally interested in just them till they walk away and another guy walks up with a load of wadded up bills. She said she would rather have been home watching CSPAN. She must have been very bored indeed.
Like the stripper, the teacher is forced to smile and say nice things as a parade of parents line up in front of her begging for attenion. Parents ask questions about their kid and she would pretend how wonderful the kid was, even though she could barely put a name to a face. She did her best to seem interested but really she would have preferred to be watching “Game of Thrones” in her stretch pants with the kittens silkscreened on them.
They both seemed sad and more than a little run down by having to put on this strained performance over and over to time-greedy patrons/parents. No stripper is that turned on by every guy who walks up to them with grubby dollars in their hand. Similarly, maybe we expect too much of our teachers especially since we pay them so poorly. Or we could start tipping them? We should consider the teacher tipping option carefully, there is ample evidence that service improves with generous tipping. But maybe it would just turn them into more enthusiastic performers who would still rather be at home.
I am willing to try anything because going through another back to school night pantomime has just become too fake for me. I remember dragging my own parents to back to school night in high school. Each teacher had a painted on smile that would not crack no matter what the parents said. I could see the teachers straining to come up with something nice to say about the kids. The responses always had the same ring to them:
- Johnny is doing wonderfully in my class, I am sure we expect great things
- Sandra is working very hard, I am sure we will see improvement by end of the term.
Or in my case, have you considered our vocational school, your daughter would make a heck of a cashier. College? My parents were asking if college was a possibility. Mostly, the teachers responded, that it is unlikely given my “skill set”. One even said, save the money with this one.
Maybe I just have a bad case of PBTSND — Post Back To School Night Disorder, but it seems like a throwback to an age when class sizes were smaller and teaching was more personal and less regimented and regulated. We should just scrap the whole thing and do some kind of charity project for the school like painting it or raising money for sports. Or how about a food drive? I am just over the whole thing and I would rather be at home in my stretch pants binge-watching Fixer Upper Flipper Flop on HGTV.
