Halloween has come and gone. We are officially in Holiday Season in our home and I know for some it’s like a marathon but for me, it’s never long enough.

My oldest is going to be 12 years old on Monday. Twelve. TWELVE! That’s just crazy to me. We recently had an issue with him that is the main cause of this post. He came home with a failing grade. I wish I could fully explain to you just how OUT OF CHARACTER this is for him. I have been blessed enough to never have had to have a conversation with either of my boys about school grades. They’re well behaved, smart and pretty easy going. Aside from being fairly emotional (genetics is a scary scary thing), there really are no complaints when it comes to my boys. You can imagine my shock, when on checking his grades on-line I saw that he got a 3.4 out of 100 on a test in Science. I can’t imagine how badly you have to do in order to get a 3.4 on a test. Don’t they give you two points for putting your name at the top? With the invention of “family access” you have to ability to see your child’s grades in real time. It’s a way to keep track of assignments, test scores, teacher concerns and more. His overall grade in each class fluctuates with each test score and you can see what they need work on every single day. If you’re like me (slightly nosey when it comes to your kids) and you want to be able to keep track of your kids at school … Family Access is a great thing right?

I’m starting to wonder if it truly is. Or maybe my involvement with it is too much. I have no idea. All I know is that, we chewed my poor baby out and as it turns out … the grade wasn’t correct. He got a 3.4 out of 4. Oooops. My bad kiddo! We sat him down and apologized to him. Told him that we are proud of him and we explained that it was sooooo out of character that we became instantly worried. With all the changes this year and him having so much more responsibility, we thought maybe he was starting to feel overwhelmed and things were slipping. We realized that we were wrong and we wanted him to know that.

Then we started thinking about life and how having instant access to everything seems to spoil some things. This wouldn’t have happened if not for family access (or my obsession with it) because I would have just seen the actual test and the report card. In this instance, I almost think it’s better to get back to basics. How many things in our lives do we have access to that we don’t really NEED? How have they changed our lives for the better and how have they made things just plain confusing? At my younger son’s school, they don’t even give an overall grade in each subject. You just see a variety of test scores. The teacher told me to average them to get his grade.  I implement a lot of on-line goodies in my daily life and my photography. I walk around with an iPhone, an iPad, and a laptop on occasion. Do I really NEED all that? Do you? I think there is a right way and a wrong way to add value or promote ease. If teachers were completely infallible, this probably would have never occurred to me. This misunderstanding may have never happened. Unfortunately, teachers are human beings. Human beings make mistakes.

What do you think? How much accessibility is too much? What do you see out there that you think is great and done well? What have you seen out there that is just plain confusing and you can definitely live without? What do you see that is really a trick or a treat?