On Campus

New online program lets parents monitor children’s marks, attendance

Parent Connect: the ultimate fart joke

Forget radar. Forget GPS. Forget heat-seeking GPS radar. A new online program gives parents instant-access to their children’s marks and attendance. Parents can even access the information on their cell phones, allowing them to check whether their children are skipping class, overdue on an assignment, or blinking at a rate that could damage ocular blood vessels.

It’s called Parent Connect. And there’s no escaping it.

For anyone who has absolutely no idea what the heck this online program is about, it’s sort of like King Kong. Which isn’t just a movie about a giant ape, or even just about a giant ape on an island inhabited by crispy-looking pygmies. It’s a movie about a giant ape on an island inhabited by crispy-looking pygmies AND infested with carnivorous dinosaurs.

I’m not sure how the same guy who made the Lord of the Rings, an epic trilogy about friendship and bravery (and goblins getting their brains plucked through their ears by slow-motion arrows), was in any way involved with King Kong. Either way, there is a similarity to Parent Connect: both are ideas that sucked from the beginning.

Parent Connect doesn’t even measure up to the Transformers movie, which at least had potential, but then was tragically lost to the ancient evil known as fart jokes.

Okay, maybe there’s absolutely no correlation between an online program that tracks students’ marks and movies about giant apes and giant robots. And farts. The point is, Parent Connect was doomed from the start: the problem that it’s trying to solve is a problem in and of itself. And no, I’m not exactly sure what that means. I just thought it sounded cool.

Using an internet program to ensure that kids are making it to English class on time makes about as much sense as reading Hamlet upside-down in Klingon with loud pop music in the background. It’s as ridiculous of a solution as expecting someone to kill a fanged, super-human blood-thirsty vampire by nicking them with a sharp wooden spike (wait, that does work).

To be fair, I can kind of understand why parents might need to use the internet to check on their children’s marks and attendance. I mean, it’s not like they live in the same house or anything. And to be honest, I don’t see a student’s marks as being their parents’ business. After all, it’s not like parents pay for their children’s book bags, calculators and hair cuts, buy their clothes, or supply them with food and a place to sleep.

Oh wait…

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