Handling my kids' school stuff then and now

When my eldest child started going to school in the mid-2000s, life was very very simple. Mimeographed circulars were always distributed whenever there was something happening -- holidays, field trips, programs, talks, etc. In fact we parents were instructed to keep all of these printed material in a folder for reference. With the start of each school year, we would elect a parent class representative and an assistant. They would be our class' official representatives with school administrators and they would be in charge of disseminating information. I never once ran for or volunteered for this position because it's a really big responsibility I knew I could not afford to take on given my own workload and schedule. I really admire the people who continuously do -- it's really a labor of love because, well, for starters you don't get paid to be a class rep but the time and effort involved makes it just as time-consuming as a job.

We all used to communicate via text, and I remember the class rep would always have a SUN line for unlimited texting purposes since most of the predominantly Chinese parents in our school would almost always have a SUN line.

How times have changed. We now have multimedia messaging apps like Viber which take our school-related communications on an entirely different level. I have Viber groups for both of my kids' classes.

Not only can we text each other via Viber, we can actually share notes so if say a child was absent. There's no longer a need to physically borrow notes because the moms can instantly take photos of the notes and assignments that day and share with the group. It's really so much more convenient!

With this kind of setup, we can easily compare and verify information about specific school requirements. Announcements can be made to the entire class with a single message. Read more »

Posted in: Misc