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As I was entering fourth grade at Riverside Elementary School in Columbia, Tenn., my teacher made my mother a promise: "I'm going to make Mark into an A student."
Mom nodded and smiled, but inside she seethed. "He's already an A student," she thought.
This story became part of our family lore, probably because it was one of the rare times my parents actually talked to one of my teachers.
That was 50 years ago. Now, the amount of communication between parents and teachers is vast.
We get texts, emails and automated phone calls from our sons' schools. There are special websites and apps to track grades, projects and homework assignments. If carrier pigeons and smoke signals were available, we'd use them, too.
Hardly a day goes by that I don't get a message or two from teachers. Just this morning, I got an email from one of my older son's teachers about an afterschool tutorial opportunity. I also got an email from my younger son's teacher about one of his projects. Both bits of information were useful.
Last night, my younger son wrapped an action figure in strips of gauze to approximate King Tut's mummy and drew hieroglyphics on a piece of brown paper. The email from his teacher reminded us that a description of each item should be included in his project "box." Check.
Meanwhile, the message from one of my other son's middle-school teachers reported that some kids needed to retake a test. I quickly looked up his grade online to see if it applied to him. Check.
During the recent snow holidays, my older son got an email from school about how he could make good academic use of his day off. He told me that another teacher sent out to a link to a video lecture.
On some level, all this parent-teacher communication is good. I feel in touch with my sons' schoolwork, so I am rarely blindsided by report cards. I can track missed assignments. Both my sons know that, when it comes to getting zeros, Daddy has zero tolerance.
I'm also married to an educator, so I understand how clear communication between parents and teachers is an indispensable part of modern education.
Still, I believe there is a point of diminishing returns with all this electronic give and take.
Perhaps teachers and parents have become so invested in student performance that they are over-communicating. When I check my older son's grades, it feels like I'm looking at gains and losses in the stock market. When my younger son gets a project back, it feels like I'm getting a grade, too.
Those are my personal issues, I understand, but all these communication channels makes these anxieties possible. Lost, perhaps, in all this is teacher-parent communication is the greatest educational tool of all: A child's freedom to fail.
The helicopter parenting we hear about from college advisers is born of this. Children are so accustomed to getting daily life-coaching from their parents, some of them fall apart when left on their own. Who doesn't know a kid who has returned from college after a semester without parental supervision?
Maybe failing an eighth-grade English test to begin to learn resilience wouldn't be so bad after all.