In our last meeting with Justin’s teachers, everyone exchanged email addresses and we were given to understand that his teaching team (mostly my age) were very comfortable communicating with email; in fact, they generally checked their email messages hourly (as opposed to voicemail, which is checked only near the end of the day).

Today, I got an email from Justin’s science teacher letting me know what projects he had done, which were overdue, and what was going to be due this week. Once I got home I printed it out and we went over the list in detail. Justin will be going in to school early tomorrow morning but that wasn’t the worst of it for him.

After we got done with the review of projects, I brought him into the office and showed him the email from his teacher (timestamped, I made sure to point out, twenty minutes after class had let out for the day) and explained that in addition to his daily teacher-verified student planner*, we’d be getting lovely, up-to-the-very-minute emails from his teachers if any assignments seemed to have gone missing. I explained that they loved to use email — preferred to, in fact. He already knows that I do.

The expression on his face, very nearly verging on tears, could best be described as ‘horrified’.

* - Justin's student planner has a place for him to fill in his his assignments every day. The system in place (now) is that he has to write the assignment down and the teacher has to sign it before he leaves school for the day.

If he leaves it blank or simply writes 'no assignment' (he has to write down what they did, if there was no assignment and they have to sign that), or there's no signature, then I get to make up homework when he gets home and write it into the space myself.

Which I hate doing, because it takes time to set up the assignment, so I always make it harder than the normal assignment would be. He knows this, because we'd danced to this tune before.

"O brave new world ..."

I think that level of communication (both technologically and culturally) is most excellent.

My sister Rainbow K's homework-due-list is up (in advance) on the school's website. This means I and her folks know whether or not she can actually do things like go to miniature-painting night on Tuesdays, let alone gaming on Sundays. On the other hand, I'm thinking it's going to provide ample incentive to learning how to hack the site.

Meera, I'm SO GLAD you mentioned this -- I went on the school's website and found homework lists for every class in school. Granted, there's a few blanks here and there, but it's really good stuff.

This puts me on the wrong side of the do-right fence, but boy, did I ever get a surge of sympathy for the poor kid.

I never brought my homework home. It was all easy enough I finished it in school in the class time other kids were still working on their in-class assignments or noodling around doing nothing.

Being a mouse with no friends had one good aspect.

I sympathize with him, too. (I never brought home homework either, but again, that was because I got it done in class.)

He doesn't. At all. He draws on himself because "he's bored" and then has fifteen assignments to work on each week and wonders why he never has time to do anything fun after school.

BWAHAHAHAHAAA!

Pardon me for gloating, but as a Future Educator of America(tm), this amuses me to no end.
SWS

Man, oh man, I am soooooo glad they didn't have email like this when I was in school. Damn I would have hated that kind of pressure following me around every minute of every day.

You want stress? My dad was a member of the school board all through junior high and high school.

In a small town.

That would explain a great many things.