单选题 When our children are born, we study their every eyelash and marvel at the perfection of their toes, and in no time become experts in all that they do. But then the day comes when we are expected to hand them over to a stranger standing at the head of a room full of bright colors and small chairs. Well aware of the difference a great teacher can make—and the damage a bad teacher can do—parents turn over their kids and hope. Please handle with care. Please don"t let my children get lost. They"re breakable. And precious. Oh, but push them hard and don"t let up, and make sure they get into Harvard.
But if parents are searching for the perfect teacher, teachers are looking for the ideal parent, a partner but not a pest, engaged but not obsessed, with a sense of perspective and patience. And somehow just at the moment when the experts all say the parent-teacher alliance is more important than ever, it is also becoming harder to manage. At a time when competition is rising and resources are strained, when battles over testing and accountability force schools to adjust their priorities, when cell phones and e-mail speed up the information flow and all kinds of private ghosts and public quarrels creep into the parent-teacher conference, it"s harder for both sides to step back and breathe deeply and look at the goals they share.
Ask teachers about the best part of their job, and most will say how much they love working with kids. Ask them about the most demanding part, and they will say dealing with parents. In fact, a new study finds that of all the challenges they face, new teachers rank handling parents at the top. According to preliminary results from the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, parent management was a bigger struggle than finding enough funding or maintaining discipline or enduring the toils of testing. It"s one reason that 40% to 50% of new teachers leave the profession within five years. Even master teachers who love their work call this "the most treacherous part of their jobs."
"Everyone says the parent-teacher conference should be pleasant, civilized, a kind of dialogue where parents and teachers build alliances," Lawrence-Lightfoot observes. "But what most teachers feel, and certainly what all parents feel, is anxiety, panic and vulnerability." While teachers worry most about the parents they never see, the ones who show up faithfully pose a whole different set of challenges. "I could summarize in one sentence what teachers hate about parents," says the head of a private school. "We hate it when parents undermine the education and growth of their children. That"s it, plain and simple."

单选题 The word "pest" (first sentence, Para.2) probably refers to ______.

单选题 In the last sentence of the second paragraph the author mentions some situations to make the point that ______.

单选题 The parent-teacher conference is characterized by ______.

单选题 It is implied that parent-teacher relationship is made tense mainly by ______.

单选题 The author seems to be critical of ______.