My daughter will graduate from Junior High School in a few days, and I will have survived putting 2 kids through high school without participating in any of the parent group chats.
It’s probably a generational thing, because when we started off in grade 1 many moons ago, there were no group chats, just assignment notebooks with daily reminders. Aside from the parent-teacher conferences that were arranged if something either went terribly wrong or terribly well, the assignment notebook was the only way of communication between the parent and teacher. And I was fine with that.
There were no surprise announcements in the middle of the night, because everything had to be planned and written on the blackboard, to be copied on the notebook before the kids leave the classroom at the end of the day.
There were no further discussions with input from parents who want things to be done a certain way. No debates, no drama, no annoying notifications or the phone trilling every few minutes every time something “exciting” is happening.
So when technology caught up, accelerated further by the COVID pandemic and the rise of the online classroom, I guess I considered myself lucky because my kids were already old enough to take care of themselves by then. For me, that meant minimal supervision, which means I don’t have to be involved in any of the class-related group chats. All I need to know is what time school starts and ends, and if they need to bring anything for projects and events, which is something I expect my kids to tell me, not some GC that I’ll have to scroll through and sift through random gossip and comments before getting to the point.
These days, when my younger sister tells me stories of the parents/class GC for her grade 1 and grade 4 kids, I cannot imagine having to deal with it. Knowing me, I’d probably have that GC on permamute simply because leaving might be considered drastic and rude. I only hope that her kids and their batchmates are somehow allowed to outgrow the parent-heavy GC dynamic soon, because if you come to think of it, they are the ones going to school and should learn to deal with everything that comes with it, and not be hounded by parents who could very possibly be vicariously living life through their own kids.
On the flip side, maybe I’m just the outlier here and the GC could be a very useful tool for both the students and their parents that I’m not using. Anyway, it should no longer be my problem anymore because I don’t expect parent-involved GCs to be a thing in Senior High School. Or is it a thing these days too? Anyway if it is, I’m probably still putting it on mute if I get invited into one when school opens in a couple of months, so it shouldn’t really matter. I hope everyone on it enjoys it and finds it useful though, because it is quite possible that I’m just being a grumpy old man sooner than I expected and this is my way of telling people to get off my lawn.
If you ask me, the bigger the group chat, the less useful it becomes because of the time it wastes scrolling through it, along with having to deal with so many different personalities with their own quirks and agenda for being there. Maybe I’m just antisocial, but I find that the group chats I pay attention to are the ones with 10 or less members.
Another thing that makes GCs annoying is that there are so many of them. It’s not just the plethora of GCs on just one app, it is multiplied by the number of apps with their own GCs that we have to contend with, such as Messenger, Viber, WhatsApp, Discord, etc… Heck, there are even different versions of the same group chatting in different apps. Most of the time, it is virtually impossible to find an important piece of information that can be found on a GC because we have to search through so many chats and sift through so much noise that by the time we do get to it, those of us advancing in age already forget what we were looking for in the first place.
Of course, group chats also have their advantages, keeping those who either enjoy the conversation or have the patience to sift through the noise connected and always updated in a way that we have never been before. It has become an important part of our lives, among family members, at school and work, and various social circles, and even if some complain, I don’t think we are going to get rid of it anytime soon. We will just have to learn how to work with it and make the most of it.*
