PTMs: student perspective

Express Tribune

22-06-2025

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Out of the troika – parents, teachers and students – of the education of a child, I have already written on the roles and rights of parents and teachers in the parent-teacher meetings organised regularly by educational institutions, and I am surprised how I could delay writing on the students' perspective on the PTM after writing the first column 'Teachers and parental feedback' on May 6, 2024 and the second one 'PTMs and parental involvement' on May 13, 2024. My apologies, guys!
On a lighter note, students expand the abbreviation of PTM in the vernacular as 'Puttar teri mot' (dude, your death is coming). The vernacular decoding, however, says it all about the apprehensions students have of the PTMs.
Generally but counterproductively, a PTM opens up with parents and teachers starting a cacophonous duet of a student's negative traits, academic struggles and disruptive actions. Finding himself viced between the two powers, the student thinks that the PTM has no solution to his problems. He internalises his resentment with the people from whom he expects empathy. It eventuates behavioural aberrations.
It has been observed that after every PTM, students find their relationship with parents or teachers more strained. That's why students, particularly those who lag behind in studies, dislike the PTMs – the platform where they are humiliated by their care providers. The day PTM is held is often dubbed "the judgement day" or "the day of retribution".
If parents and teachers don't present themselves as the ones who students can confide in, then feeling left in the lurch, what would they do but distrust them? In their heart of hearts, the marooned students must have been thinking that "each one of us is greater than the worst thing we have ever done."
Parents and teachers must avoid hurling jeremiads at students' study deficits. Hanlon's razor says: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." And, if students cannot be exonerated for their stupidity, then who must be? Russell Barkley once said, "The children who need love the most will always ask for it in the most unloving ways."
Students want to be heard. They want to be known. But they are neither heard nor allowed to have their say. That's why they believe that the PTMs are about them, not for them. They are forced to do what doesn't hold their heart; they do it willy-nilly and fail to excel in that. Deepak Chopra says, "If a child is poor in math but good at tennis, most people would hire a math tutor. I would rather hire a tennis coach."
At the Budapest 2022 World Aquatics Championships, US artistic swimmer Anita Alvarez sank to the bottom of the pool, unconscious. Only Anita's coach Andrea Fuentes got apprehensive and shouted at the lifeguards who couldn't understand the emergency. The coach sprinted and dived into the pool to save Anita because she knew her student and her limit to hold her breath underwater. Fuentes received widespread admiration for the dramatic rescue.
Our students too want such a rescue at the PTMs, but they don't find any. The legendary educator Rita Pierson, in her appearance at the TED Talks Education, says, "Every child deserves a champion – an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be." Students want someone understand them. Failing on that, the outcome is as expected: quiet quitting, indiscipline and defiance.
A PTM lacerates scars on students' self-respect when they are humiliated in the presence of the class fellows and their parents. "Students don't learn from people they don't like," asserts Rita. Also, peer judgement proves more deleterious. To avoid this soul piercing, PTMs must be punctuated with tete-a-tetes between students and their teachers to discuss their mutual problems and challenges, particularly of students whose antics are actually the SOS calls.
"Every child you encounter is a divine appointment," says Wess Stafford, a devout believer in the divinity of children. Students open up with parents who are always around whenever children need them. PTMs must be places of constructive dialogue, not trial courts, for students.