My son’s in his senior year of high school. One of his classes, technically called COURSE 8144Â HEALTH IV LAB has a section where the kids are supposed to learn about the evils of unplanned reproduction. Yeah, that topic has been the source of school controversy on and off over the years for various reasons. The study material seems to follow a pattern: explain the nuts & bolts, so to speak, in the most clinical and least offending way possible before lapsing into scare tactics. Today’s scare is twofold – personal convenience paired with economics.
On the convenience front, many students elect to provide care for a pseudo-baby, a small sack of flour that they get to carry around everywhere in their day-to-day life. I think they even need to dress the thing. I suppose (but I’m not sure) that at the end of a period of time the sack’s inspected for wear and tear. A couple of years back, with the assignment complete, one student ‘celebrated’ his regained freedom by hurling his sack across the gym up into the bleachers.
Turning to economics, the assignment has students researching the costs of the necessities of life, from food, shelter and transportation to phones and cable TV. The inevitable conclusion is that you really can’t afford it, especially in New Jersey.
So where’s the spam come in? In at least one instance, a required source of research material was a commercial Website where the student was compelled to register with their email address. Recognizing the potential problem, we created a new email address specifically for this purpose. It turned out to be a worthwhile precaution. The spam received there swelled until the account was shut down. But the school apparently passes student information to others, too. The assault on our physical mailbox continues. It started with the magazines that target new parents and grew from there to include envelopes full of coupons, pitches from insurance companies, photographers, doctors, drug companies, internet services like picture and social sites, and a whole lot more. Some companies send samples, too: diapers, formula and so on.
And once the spammers get going you know they don’t stop.
In fact, I saw an interesting somewhat related Forbes article where a dad found out about his daughter’s pregnancy by way of advertising from Target. Pretty creepy stuff.
