Big Mama is Watching
5/5/08 16:27![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madrobinsI will be the first, and possibly the second, to acknowledge that raising kids is not easy. As the parent of a child whose attitude toward homework can be a trifle...cavalier, I can sympathize with other parents who are afraid their kids may not be making the grade. Whatever the hell that means. But reading about ParentConnect in yesterday's Times scared the hell out of me.
Has it come to this? Here I was feeling a little bit guilty for sending my cavalier daughter's teachers a weekly email to make sure she was on track. It felt intrusive. School is, in part, the place that kids go to get away from home (in the same way that home is where they go to get away from school. It's wonderful how that works.) But this... my God, who would be a child in this day and age? If what you want to do is prepare your child for a lifetime of micromanagement, maybe ParentConnect and services like it are the way to go. And granted, in the war between parents and children, a certain amount of flexibility regarding the hard and fast truth may be invoked by the young ("How was math today?" "Oh, fine."). But to back your child up against the wall this way seems to me so sinister, so indicative of what's going wrong with the people who are running educational policy in this country (not the teachers, but the ones prescribing what and how they teach), and so ruinous to the relationship between kids and parents, that it makes me want to scream.
Well, I feel better for saying that. But that's not going to help Ms. Dobbins's poor kids. Up against the wall, 4th grader, and explain this spelling grade.
Cripes.
On school days at 2 p.m., Nicole Dobbins walks into her home office in Alpharetta, Ga., logs on to ParentConnect, and reads updated reports on her three children. Then she rushes up the block to meet the fourth and sixth graders’ buses.
But in the thump and tumble of backpacks and the gobbling of snacks, Mrs. Dobbins refrains from the traditional after-school interrogation: Did you cut math class? What did you get on your language arts test?
Thanks to ParentConnect, she already knows the answers. And her children know she knows. So she cuts to the chase: “Tell me about this grade,” she will say.
When her ninth grader gets home at 6 p.m., there may well be ParentConnect printouts on his bedroom desk with poor grades highlighted in yellow by his mother. She will expect an explanation. He will be braced for a punishment.
Has it come to this? Here I was feeling a little bit guilty for sending my cavalier daughter's teachers a weekly email to make sure she was on track. It felt intrusive. School is, in part, the place that kids go to get away from home (in the same way that home is where they go to get away from school. It's wonderful how that works.) But this... my God, who would be a child in this day and age? If what you want to do is prepare your child for a lifetime of micromanagement, maybe ParentConnect and services like it are the way to go. And granted, in the war between parents and children, a certain amount of flexibility regarding the hard and fast truth may be invoked by the young ("How was math today?" "Oh, fine."). But to back your child up against the wall this way seems to me so sinister, so indicative of what's going wrong with the people who are running educational policy in this country (not the teachers, but the ones prescribing what and how they teach), and so ruinous to the relationship between kids and parents, that it makes me want to scream.
Well, I feel better for saying that. But that's not going to help Ms. Dobbins's poor kids. Up against the wall, 4th grader, and explain this spelling grade.
Cripes.