I am curating a list of parent email addresses for this week’s unofficial mailout to parents of their child’s progress reports. I have two — count ’em — two — students who have no parental contact information. I don’t know the kid’s home address, nor their parent’s names, nor anything about them, and certainly not their email addresses.
I am beginning to imagine that some students are taking my fully online course while living in a cardboard box underneath the 403 exit ramp, close enough to Square One Mall and the Central Library to get free wifi and charging outlets on laptops they fished out of a dumpster at Best Buy. At night, they crawl back into their cardboard boxes to sleep with one eye open should there be raccoons or other feral animals about.
To ease their psychological pain and suffering, they set up a moonshine still out of pots shoplifted from Crate and Barrel and discarded polypropylene tubing from the Credit Valley Hospital and cases of whiskey they obtained by breaking into the local LCBO.
Anyway, it actually turns out these kids are from another school disctrict, and so we have minimal information as a result. So there is nothing to worry about. In addition, their attendance and engagement in the online course has been pretty good. Nothing to see here. … Or is there?