Student anxiety: ‘They’re talking about me’
Print Edition
YAO Yang, an eight-year-old in the second grade, cringes a bit when she sees her mother typing into her cell phone. She fears she’s talking with her teacher about her.
“My teacher loves to report on us, and she can always find something to tell,” complains Yao. “You were not active in class. You didn’t do well on a test. You ran too fast in the corridor. You ate lunch too slowly. Your handwriting is poor.”
To be fair, Yao’s mother is pretty reasonable and sympathetic, even when her teacher has mild complaints to pass on. But the looming sense of “big brother” has created a sense of paranoia in the young girl.
“It seems that someone is always watching you, and that doesn’t feel good,” she says.
The relationship between teachers, students and parents has changed a lot with the advent of social networking services. Instant and constant communications bore into realms once shaped by face-to-face contact and respect for confidentiality. In some instances, parents can even monitor their young children at kindergarten via video links on their smartphones.
Of course, it’s not just education where the Internet has intervened so dramatically in daily life. The popularity of social media sites has made everything we do, everywhere we go and everything we think fodder for a mass audience — at least for those obsessed with their smartphones.
Yao was born in the digital age and has had to endure teacher-parent chitchat from her first day in school. For older teenagers, however, the intrusion has been more sudden and alarming.
Jean Fan is a Grade-7 student in high school. She says her parents and teachers used to occasionally communicate via WeChat, but it became a formal link when teachers created WeChat groups that dragged all parents into daily discussions.
“It felt like my world was turned upside down,” says Fan. “Suddenly mom and dads were talking about their kids, and parents were comparing notes.”
Fan says students are banned from the parent WeChat groups, so they never know what exactly is being discussed about their grades, their achievements and their educational futures.
“My parents started to become anxious, wondering if they weren’t putting enough pressure on me to keep up with my peers,” she says. “That’s when the nightmare really began.”
Parents, however, tend to welcome such chat groups, even if the arrogance and comments of other parents are sometimes unpleasant.
Zhou Yin, father of a nine-year-old boy, says when he was young, parents talked to teachers only during parents’ meeting or when he had really made big mistakes and his parents were called in for a private conference.
Now, with WeChat groups, teachers can give parents running commentaries on how classes and individual students are performing. They also use the groups to convey messages about exams, school events and homework assignments.
One professional woman with a young son in school was constantly interrupted at work by the pinging of her smartphone. She explained sheepishly that she didn’t want to miss any message from a teacher, admitting that the parent chat group she belongs to can be an unavoidable nuisance.
“It sometimes causes problems,” Zhou admits. “Teachers may not treat every student in a class equally. Teachers may post event pictures showing selected students or single out specific students for praise. I think that’s inappropriate.”
Teachers, usually the creators of such chat groups, also confront a downside. The behavior of some parents in the groups can be annoying.
Le Duoduo, a psychologist and author of children’s literature, says she often receives complaints from teachers about rude, pushy parents in the chat groups. It prompted her to collect some of the stories she heard into an essay entitled “Please Don’t Be That Annoying Parent.”
In the essay, Le recounted chat group sessions where parents whined about their in-laws, posting ads and online game invitations, fawned obsequiously over teachers, sent pinging messages late into the night, bragged about their children and used the groups to exchange “red-pocket” money.
“It seems that many parents don’t understand the purpose of these chat groups,” says Le. “They see them as a general format for socializing. Their behavior can affect the way teachers treat their children and can even spur gossips among children.”
The most awkward situation arises, of course, when parents fight among themselves. Disagreements usually start with children bickering at school and then the dispute gets replayed in a parental chat group. In such cases, parents usually expect teachers to intervene and judge who should apologize to whom. And yes, teachers are not amused.
“Most teachers want personal boundaries with parents, no matter what the parents might think,” says Le. “The teachers started these groups as a way of posting notices so that parents would know what’s going on at school. It was never meant to be a forum for parents saying anything they wanted.”
Le tells teachers to implement strict guidelines when creating parent chat groups, limiting content to matters related to school. She also advises them to avoid singling out specific students, in either photos or words, on the chat sites.
“All parents were students once, and they should think how it would feel if their parents had been able to monitor their every scholastic move in a chat group,” says Le. “Children need trust to grow up in a healthy, independent fashion.”
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