The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Playing hooky just got a lot more problematic for Flin Flon teens. Hapnot Collegiate and Many Faces Education Centre have granted parents online access to their children's daily academic and attendance records. If you miss a class, mom and dad can easily find out. If they are among the growing majority of Canadians who surf the web, all it takes is a few clicks of a mouse and a few taps of a keyboard. Many teens must be lamenting this turn of events. Gone are the days when all it took to cut class unscathed was to make sure you answered the phone when Hapnot's autodialer called your house after school. The autodialer would dish out a pre-recorded spiel about how "your son or daughter" was absent from one or more classes that day, oblivious to the fact that the guilty party was often the one listening to the message. Yes, you will be missed, hapless autodialer, but the fact that you are being superseded by more effective technology is a good thing for our teens Ð even if they don't know it yet. I certainly wouldn't have known it when I was 14, 15 or 16. I freely admit that my first three years of high school were lacklustre, to put it mildly. It's not that I was dumb. I was just stuck in that place teenagers often find themselves where school and the importance of learning meant little. As a result, my grades were largely mediocre (English remained my strength) and my absenteeism was through the roof. I dropped classes I couldn't afford to drop. But because there was no tangible link between the school and my parents, I was able to cover things up. I would come home after skipping a class (or two or three) and sit by the phone, ready to pounce the moment it rang. I heard that speech about "your son or daughter" missing class so many times, I can still recite it word for word. Even when mom or dad did get to the phone first, there were times they thought the autodialer was a telemarketer and promptly hung up. If they actually did hear the message, my excuse was always, "Well, the machine must have dialed the wrong number." By the end of Grade 11, I was seven credits below where I should have been. I had my Grade 10 science, but not my Grade 9 science. I had Grade 9 phys-ed, but not Grade 10. As one teacher later put it, my transcript was "really screwed up." Did my parents know this? Of course not. In addition to covering my hooky tracks, I grew quite adept at making my academic performance appear, shall we say, more complete than it actually was. I was missing a math credit on one report card, so I just lied and said my graphic arts credit was really math. Graphic arts had a nondescript title Ð something like "GA20G" Ð so my claim was plausible. On another occasion, I literally chopped the bottom off my report card. The report card was printed on thick computer paper, with straight, horizontal lines running all the way across. A couple of snips of the scissors across one of those lines and the end result looked surprisingly legitimate, with all evidence of a failed science course expunged. I'm not proud of any of this, by the way. Fortunately, by the time I was 17 I had grown up enough to realize how stupid and shameless I had been. After I saw the light, high school was a breeze, and actually enjoyable. It took me an extra year to graduate, but I'm proud to say that I went back and earned every single credit I was lacking. I went on to university and graduated. At the same time, some of the people I went to school with never finished Grade 12. I am not blaming Hapnot or Many Faces, but perhaps if their parents had known more about their school situation in a more timely manner, a little parental intervention could have produced a positive outcome on graduation day. That's the reason I am such a big believer in what our high schools are doing today. Their online accounts will let parents keep proper tabs on their children. Parents will become aware of problems far earlier than they might have just a short time ago, and hopefully take steps to help their sons and daughters pull through. That is a plus for the parents and a plus for the students Ð even if they don't know it yet. Local Angle runs Fridays.
