I get it. Technology is pretty much everything right now. Everything is paperless. Most people carry around a smart phone with a calendar on it. My husband prefers his phone calendar. Me? I love my day-timer and my wall calendar. I love post-its and paper and sharpies and all that. My husband and I for the most part have managed to co-exist with our different ways, very few appointments have been missed.

But thats not really what I want to talk about today. It’s that EVERYTHING is going paperless lately; bills, letters, and now at my children’s school. And I HATE it.

There is no longer any responsibility put on kids to make sure they bring home important notes and paper work. Everything is on the school website or emailed to us. I hate it. I remember both dreading and loving when I got to bring home stuff. I was proud when I remembered something and didn’t lose anything. My kids? They don’t bring anything home now so they don’t get to experience that and learn.

And now my kids school has started an online thing were you have to email when your kid is sick. So no more talking to an actual human. No interaction whatsoever. Yes I am sure this cuts down on the phone calls the school gets during flu season, but still. Maybe it is the stay at home mom in me, but a little human interaction with an adult would be nice.

On top of that, they also started a program online so when you need to send money to school, again the kid is taken out the equation and no responsibility at all is placed on the child, the parent simply pays online. We can’t even send $1 into school with our child for popcorn day.

My children can also do their homework online and send it to their teacher. Again, no responsibility to make sure they bring home the homework, do the homework and then remember it in the morning! No extra responsibility at all.

Yes I see the upside, my kids will never lose an important paper, they won’t forget their homework at school, they won’t forget their homework at home, they won’t lose a field trip form and miss out on it, they won’t take money to school and risk the chance of losing that if they aren’t careful.

But I also see the downside, my kids will never learn simple responsibly because they will never lose an important paper – it will just get emailed to me, they won’t forget their homework at school because its online, they won’t get marks taken off their homework because they left it at home in their morning rush, they won’t miss out on a field trip because they won’t have to bring home the form, and as long as I pay online they won’t have the responsibility to cary around a couple dollars for pizza day which they may or may not lose if they had kept the money in their pocket and went running around playing at school.

Its all part of technology and our world it seems. So many things rely on the internet. I’m not against it, I don’t think machines will rise up one day and kill us all (SkyNet). But I don’t agree with technology taking away responsibility from my kids. Simple things that for a child are big things. Simple things that lead to bigger things.

~ Michelle