I have two sources that can vouch that the internet portals that international schools use in Wuxi to communicate with parents are foul-language inducing. One of them is I, a parent who has to use this Canadian Federal Government like way to communicate with the school that my son Tony is currently attending. The first time I tried to use my son's school portal, I could tell right away that there was something off about it. It was slow, in a Because-China way. I bet its servers are not in China. And what really got me to be completely against the portal was the process I had to go through to try to get Tony registered for some curricular school activities. The site was working fine, I was all set to make bookings until it was the time, 9:00 AM, to make bookings when the portal suddenly became slow and then unavailable. I had an hour before a 10:00 class to try to book activities for Tony, but it was an hour wasted as the booking page was either unavailable or unable to let me make a booking, even if I was on the page! Boy, was I swearing like a sailor! I was going to send an email to the portal saying something along the lines of it being for shit, but I instead choose to publish my informal unexpurgated thoughts here instead.
That's the first source.
Two, I have it on good authority that another international school in Wuxi uses a similar internet portal to my son's school, and that the teachers hate the portal for the same reasons that parents hate it. It is slow and unresponsive, Because-China! The teachers are required to use the portal and their office is full of swearing when they try to get on it.
(Because-China! This phrase can explain a lot of the trouble I have with the Internet.)
Tony's moaning about being in boarding is subsiding.
I help Tony with his homework now. One of the things I had to do was help him finish a S.M.A.R.T. statement for his term goal for his I.L.P. Jesus! I thought. He is only thirteen years old and they are exposing him to acronym gobbledygook. I didn't have this nonsense when I was a child. I told Tony his goal was to read and write in English better. How specifically and exactly and time-bound and achievable was this goal? (This is what the acronyms were about) I had to make things up to say that showed that the goal I set for Tony was S.M.A.R.T. Aren't the goals of learning for a young one to get better at the three R's? What other goals could there possibly be? After these are accomplished, shouldn't life be allowed to take its course with the gobbledygook?
Tony's school is a forty-minute drive from Casa Kaulins, as I have been saying. The problem with this is I haven't been able to attend any school parent events. I can only communicate with the teachers via the damn internet portal. The portal leaves me with same feeling that I got when dealing with the Canadian Consulate in Shanghai: there is a wall between the government workers and the people they are supposed to serve, and so one feels the institution is very impersonal.
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