For science teacher Julia Speyer, every day is Take Your Daughter to Work Day.

Her day starts at around 6 a.m., when she wakes up to drive to school with her daughter, sophomore Rachel Besancon.

“She’s always trying to get me out the door on time, so that she will not be late to yoga or Camerata,” Speyer said.

By 6:45 a.m., she and Besancon are in the car, ready for the half-hour commute from Natick to Brookline. They reach the school at 7:20 a.m. and head in opposite directions: Besancon to her Z block class, and Speyer to begin preparing her lessons for the day.

Besancon entered the Brookline school system in fourth grade, because her mother disliked the middle schools in Natick. She is not the only student with a parent who teaches at the high school. Others include junior Olivia Shiffman, whose father is Social Studies Curriculum Coordinator Gary Shiffman.

Unsurprisingly, however, Besancon’s situation is often a source of fascination to her classmates.

“People will come up to me and say, ‘Rachel, I saw your mom today,’ and I’m like, ‘I saw her too! That’s crazy!’” she said.

However, what might surprise her peers is that Besancon does not actually mind having a parent who works at the school; On the contrary, she enjoys it.

“Given the option of having my mom work here and having her not work here, I’d prefer that she work here,” Besancon said.

She named Speyer’s knowledge of the school as a benefit to having a mother who works as a teacher.

“If I ever have trouble in a subject, she’s heard it from all the other students, like, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve heard that advanced math is hard from all the other students,’” Besancon said.

Besancon enjoys seeing her mom at school so much that, if a friend says they saw her mom in the hallway, she has been known to go out of her way to say hello.

“Sometimes, if I’m in a meeting or something, she’ll actually double back and wave at me in the doorway, which is very nice. So she doesn’t seem to be embarrassed by me in the hallway in the least,” Speyer said.

Like Besancon, Shiffman said that having a father who works at the school rarely results in embarrassment. She, however, sees him less often during the day than Besancon sees her mother. Shiffman believes it is less widely known that her father works at the school.

“I guess it was less of a big deal than I thought it was going to be, because we never see each other or anything like that,” Shiffman said. “I felt like maybe it would be more embarrassing to have a parent at the school, or it would be terrible. But it’s okay. It’s fine.”

All the same, Besancon said that her mother’s job has resulted in a few awkward dilemmas, such as having science teachers over for breakfast, or having to address teachers she has known a long time by their last names.

However, she does not worry over the nightmare scenarios that concern her questioning friends—such as what would happen if she were ever placed in her mother’s class.

“We’ve always joked that I’d start calling her mom, and then the rest of the class would start calling her mom just to pick it up and tease her if I was in her class,” Besancon said. “But I believe the school would try to avoid putting us in the same class, unless she was the only teacher teaching that class.”

According to Besancon, the only scenario she could imagine that would make having a mother who teaches at the school a true difficulty would be if a friend of hers was placed in her mother’s class and hated it. This, however, has yet to happen.

“My mom has even given detentions to some of my friends who were acting out in her class, and they just joke about it with me,” Besancon said. “They know the difference between my mom and their teacher.”

Rather than feel awkward with her mother’s students, Besancon has actually made some of her closest friends among them. The biggest reason she likes having a mother who works at the school, she said, is that it has brought her closer to both her mom and the Brookline community at large.

“It’s a little weird, but it’s also kind of nice. Everyone knows everything about me and my mom,” Besancon said. “It’s like one big family.”

Emma Nash can be contacted at [email protected].