Creeping Big Brotherishness

Objectively speaking, I'm sure that new tools like Edline, which gives parents up-to-the-minute information about their children's academic progress--class attendance, quiz grades, the whole megillah--are probably a good thing. Identify problems early, keep families engaged with the school community, etc.

But I can't help but think that if such a tool existed when I was a senior in high school, my 17th year would have been a whole lot less fun. Once I got accepted into college, I basically stopped going to class and instead spent all my time with my buddies and girlfriend, playing ultimate frisbee and applying all of my analytic skills to calculating the precise combination of date, time of day, convenience store location, and apathetic/bribeable clerk that would most likely result in my being able to buy beer. My parents didn't discover this until my report card accidentally got mailed home six months later. Of course, being parents, they immediately panicked and assumed that the abundance of Cs, Ds, and Fs were evidence of a debilitating addiction to LSD and/or crack cocaine, which in retrospect I feel kind of bad about. That aside, I don't regret my decision for a moment; those were good times. Whence the next generation's "Dazed and Confused" if this trend is left unchecked?

Speaking of scary Internet monitoring and beer (and really, you can't do this often enough), can it really be true that Millersville University of Pennsylvania denied a 25-year old student a teaching certificate on the grounds that her MySpace page has a picture of her drinking a presumably alcoholic beverage at a party, along with the caption "Drunken Pirate"? (Hat tip: This Week in Education)