I have to say I’m a sucker for good irony. Ironic situations provide some of my favorite opportunities for humor. But the topic for today is funny on the front end while sporting an annoying hypocrisy on the backend. I am talking about the modern miracle of electronic communications from my kids’ schools. The irony comes when you consider how we are inundated with a constant flow of electronic information from the school and yet we are charged by most modern studies to reduce screen time and set an example for, you guessed it, our kids!
If you don’t have kids in school I will catch you up real quick. The days of paperwork sent home with your kid for you to review are essentially gone. You still get the occasional piece of homework to review (and sometimes sign) or a field trip permission slip to fill out with you and your child’s entire medical histories, a list of 30 contacts who can be reached in an emergency situation including their relationships and whereabouts, a critical synopsis of Dickens novels, and an indication for how you intend to prove your child is or is not asthmatic with APA citations. Sign on the dotted line. Also please print and have notarized. But everything else is communicated in some sort of electronic medium. And holy hell are there a lot of them.
Let’s start with updates regarding the classes. Teachers will send updates. Often this starts with something akin to a syllabus. Then throughout the year you will receive these on an ongoing basis in between parent/teacher conferences. Then there is the principal’s updates (mine have 4 principals across 2 kids not including the district super). These usually include news of what is going on in the school, the land next door to the school, his/her childhood hometown, and every single parent organization at that time.
Next you receive the communication from the parent groups. Most of these are run by parents that have no responsibilities outside the home but still follow the Parliamentary Procedures set forth in Robert’s Rules of Order in order to seem as important as possible. If there is a decision between annuals and perennials, there must be a case study, a fundraiser for the case study, a bake sale to raise money for advertising the fundraiser, subcommittee meetings, and then motions on the floor to pick an outcome. If no outcome is reached, we table until the next meeting or call an emergency session of the flower committee. I feel the need at this point to quote the character of John Adams from 1776, “I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace. That two are called a law firm. And that three or more become a congress.”
You have the fundraising committees (and I know they are doing thankless work so I will be brief and gentle). They raise money for anything the tax dollars don’t cover. They send enough emails so that it is hard to tell where they start and where they end. But rest assured you will know when Homecoming and Prom are coming up.
Have I mentioned Apps? There are so many apps. Currently, I have and use: Canvas, Skyward, Playmetrics, Remind, and SafeBus. One of the fun things with these is a few of them send notification emails even when you have the app. It is quite handy when I want to authenticate the app message about marching band dry cleaning day options. You never know when Russian hackers are going to send me on a wild goose chase to a nonexistent meeting on shakos pickup. It is best to be prepared. I am hoping they add 2-stage authentication soon so I can rest easier.
By now you may be thinking me a curmudgeon (you’re not wrong). But allow me this minor defense; I handle hundreds of emails every day for work and already have a ton of communications apps for everyday life. My kiddos prefer FB Messenger. Their mother is a WhatsApp fan. My closest cronies like Signal or SMS. My work uses encrypted Outlook and Teams. My groups like MMS. My former coworkers like Telegraph. And of course I have Gmail and Hangouts for the nostalgic in the stratus. And should you find yourself 43 and dating, well you have all those apps with which to communicate too. It’s enough to send a circa WW2 Enigma codebreaker running and screaming. But we accept it all as normal.
So what is the big moral lesson in this post? I’m so glad you asked. As parents we are all charged with trying to reduce the time our kid mindlessly look at screens. It pains me when we go out for a meal and I see a family with every member buried in a screen. Sometimes my kiddos and I are that family. It is something I am working on.
But let’s add to that the example we set as parents. Sure, we have to keep up with work when we are not there (some sarcasm here but some reality as well). Granted, we have to ensure no one in our inner circle wait more than 180 seconds for answers to unimportant or inconsequential questions. And yes, we have to know the score of the Qatar v Ecuador game in real-time as the stability of our very existence depends on having this information immediately because this is how we “unwind.”
Or maybe we should step back. While I have worked hard to set down the electronic data hub I often hold in my hand so that I might experience life, I am now beholden to it for all things kid school. It tells me when the lunch account is low, when $10 is needed for an event, when to be where for a band event, if the fields are open for practice, the status of bus 799, and of course all the academics. Maybe we need to think of other ways to convey all this information. I can’t stop at work to read all that stuff. After work I risk more time not being present with those I love so I can find out what time the newly-rescheduled drop off and pickup are happening at the football game pre-social.
If you are tempted to tell me how that pickup time is not important I want you to know why I disagree. If you have missed an event/payment/paper/scheduling or anything else at your kid’s school due to it falling in that one newsletter you missed, you will be treated like a fool by the school. There is no empathy for this. I can’t quantify the amount of frustrated sighs, condescension, and glares I have received because I missed something in this Jungian communication archetype. It makes me wish I was a better parent.
By the standards set forth considering today’s school communication macrocosm I am so outgunned. I don’t have it in me sometimes to read one more goddamned email which has 20 links in it I also have to follow. Oh and a few of those require logins to other apps as well. I don’t have a suggestion for something better. But an initiative to lower the amount we have to read would be great. Or perhaps we could be afforded some understanding that sometimes we get overwhelmed and can’t read everything the school sends out. I think we could all use a little empathy as well as give a little more. But either way don’t equate my ability as a parent with my bandwidth to read your newsletter and I won’t equate your ability as an educator with how you keep me up-to-the-minute-informed on the status of the brownie supply reserves for the 5th Grade raingarden bake sale. Deal?
Disclaimer: I know teachers, volunteering parents, and administrators have a lot on their plate. I know they do a hard job and we task them to inform us as to our kids’ progress. I also know they have to abide by district and state standards. But to offer some candor, I have a lot on my plate too. I’m not saying I don’t understand their challenges. Instead I am asking they take a moment to consider mine when they get pissed because I don’t recall the pertinent details of a 2000 word email written 2 months ago and 95% of which did not apply to me or my kids.
Beta Testing Adulthood 