The middle schooler had been begging to opt out, citing headaches from the Chromebook screen and a dislike of the AI chatbot recently integrated into it.
Parents across the country are taking steps to stop their children from using school-issued Chromebooks and iPads, citing concerns about distractions and access to inappropriate content that they fear hampers their kids’ education.
My first year teaching I was encouraged to do everything on the chromebooks, because the district wanted to save on printing costs.
If you have 100+ students, and are limited to 500 pages/month (I could print 500 more, but had to purchase my own paper…), you have to use the laptops.
Also, when parents and students increasingly treat attendance as a suggestion, keeping up with paper assignments is hellish. There were days I showed up with 1/3 or more of my class missing - with online class work, I at least could say “the work is available online.”
The technology is a problem, but it’s a problem that’s arisen because class sizes are out of control and admin has zero idea what is going on in the classroom. It’s a bandage that’s been left on so long the skin is starting to get infected around it.
Trying to keep old stuff alive in a digital world is stupid. I do think that kids need to learn to think and research on their own, so AI and grammar and spelling corrections should be disallowed from the laptops and Chromebooks. Having an algorithm fix everything for you and write your papers is developmentally bad.
-old person
What the fuck is it with schools being stingy with printed paper. At scale its less than a cent a sheet
Teachers where I live are constantly asking for donations of basic school supplies, snacks, tissues, and cleaning supplies for classrooms. It is incredibly disheartening.
They also have to be paying for the software that tracks how many prints you use. It’s fucking stupid, and it’s just one of a million little ways that they make sure to punish anyone stupid enough to teach.
I ended up buying my own printer. Printing alone got me to the maximum $300 of classroom expenses I was allowed to write off on taxes.
Unfortunately not only a problem in schools. Where I work at there’s already a pay per use system that bills the department, with an entire system with separate codes to identify where you belong financially. Now they’re debating adding a fee for the ability to print.
So you save 100 in taxes and pay 500 in printing costs… You’re down 400 for supplying your employer. Lol
Also spent several hundred just on vinegar and baking soda for labs.
But yeah, I actually had to quit teaching after my divorce because I could no longer afford to do it!
They’re pretty obviously supplying it for their students, not their employer. Weird as hell to rub someone’s nose in the fact their students are trapped in a school system that doesn’t even supply teachers with proper access to printed materials. Even Reddit used to run a donor program to help teachers out with the costs.
The way I read their comment was pointing out that the employer (the school district) should be providing sufficient printing. :shrug: But there’s many ways to interpret, I suppose
It’s like tipping… It happens because we let it. It’s so incredibly common that literally poor teachers are paying for basic supplies the school doesn’t when they should look those kids in the eyes and tell them they are sorry and that their society and school have failed them and to go home and tell their parents to vote differently.
Anyone that would say that to a student who turned up to learn has no business teaching. You don’t take funding problems out on students. It’s not the teacher’s obligation to self fund their classroom, but many do it because often nobody else is. Reading someone talk about that and the message you decide is important to share with them is ‘lol you’re paying your employer’ is weirdo behavior.
Execs know teachers are doing it because of internal drive to teach and not for the pay and they take advantage of it in absolutely every way they can.
If teachers want useful posters on the wall, gotta pay for it. If teachers want students to not have to share a worksheet 3:1, teachers will pay for it. It’s incredible not only how much they do for free, but how much they pay out of pocket for the “privilege”
Yeah. The system in the US works on exploiting, crushing, and discarding young teachers. Almost none of the other teachers I met while teaching are still in the profession. You are expected to martyr yourself for the job - I usually didn’t get to eat lunch, because I was busy. I stopped drinking water, because I ended up pissing myself one day when I couldn’t get to the restroom.
It still amazes me that laptops are still the cutting edge tech for schools.
General purpose computers have always had major problems with students getting distracted and going off topic, and are a never ending source of tech issues; particular when locked down in a way that still fails to address the previous issues, but makes them fail more often.
Admin is concerned about paper costs? Get every student an Eink reader. Schools are a big enough market to justify specoalized Eink readers that support classroom management style features (e.g. pushing a reading to student in the room).
Don’t want to deal with hand written essays. I was using a digital typewriter as a middle school student 20 years ago.
It’s like requing laptops for every math class because we don’t want to force students to do all their calculations by hand. But that’s not the choice: we have calculators! Even when we let them use calculators, we have a choice of what calculator to give them. We have 4 function calculators, scientific calculators, graphing calculators, symbolic calculators. And we can pick what tool we give students based on the needs of the particular lesson.
I’m old enough such that when I was at primary school (this is years 5-11 for non UKians) there was a computer. Not in every class, no. A computer, on a wheeled trolley that could be moved around. Well actually I think there were probably three. Because there were three floors and no-one was going to move that trolley up and down the stairs. But still it definitely was not one per class.
It was barely used. In fact, the teachers didn’t really know HOW to use it. They actually just let me go at it, because I did know how to work it.
In secondary school (11-15/16), things were somewhat different in that there were slightly more modern computers, most classes had one and there was a dedicated room where there was a classroom number of computers available. This was where we were taught “ICT” which, was essentially showing how to use word processors and spreadsheet software. Again teachers of the time were quite far behind and I’m not exaggerating here, I used to help the teacher, teach this class. But there was no programming, or any advanced use. It was very basic tasks with specific software. All of our written work, even for this class was written with a pen, in an exercise book.
Now, budgets were still terrible. I can be pretty sure about this because I remember that because we DID still do everything on paper, photocopies were handed around the room. Oh they weren’t any flash laser photocopy (well sometimes in secondary school it was). No, these was the kind with the fuzzy purple ink that was hand rolled to make a copy. But we got by.
Now, there’s no doubt we live in a digital world and computing must be taught because we do everything on a phone or computer now and people need to know how to do it. But, there’s still surely a good reason to be doing work in exercise books with a pen and paper? Everything cannot be on a computer.
Unbelievable…
The more I see about education nowadays, the more I realize I would not survive it anymore. So many tests and assignments and whatever, students have barely any time left to think or be bored. Everything gets constantly evaluated.
If I may ask, just how large are the classes today?
For reference, in 1980, my 10th grade English class (Mrs. Chase, she was awesome) had 36 students.
That was average for my school at the time.
The BIG classes like general US History (taught by Mr. Conway, who was wildly popular) had 40+ kids.
Mr Conway also kept a real honest to goodness stocks in his class room, so anyone that misbehaved had two options… into the stocks for the class or off to the assistant Vice Prinicpal’s office and spend a day in ISS. (in school suspension)
There would ALWAYS be one jackass Junior in each class that would opt for the stocks, at the start of every year and then NO one EVER caused a beef in Mr. Conway’s classes - or really ANY of the government studies (US History, Civics, Social Studies) deparement classes… Hearing about who chose the stocks and the rumors usually scared the underclassmen shitless, so they rarely ever piped up… except for the really stupid smartasses that always tried to test how far they could go…
The most I dealt with was around 36. I had around 28 chairs.
However, the feeder middle school had class sizes of 60+. There were literal riots, with multiple teachers injured, that the district covered up.
Stocks would absolutely not be allowed. I had a student that spent fifteen minutes screaming and cussing me out, straight to my face in front of a principle. When she said “I wish I wasn’t in your class” and I said “me too” - I got in trouble. (She was mad because I wrote her up for literally just walking into my classroom to sell snacks. She didn’t attend classes, she just did whatever she wanted.)
This was a public school and they tolerated this shit?
Sweet Jesus the standards have fallen.
Is it the parents, school board and administration or a combination of all 3?
It sounds like there should be a platform designed for school. IT can block access to all resources except the platform. Kids log-in to www.my-school.platform.edu and immediately have an answer for:
Then there’s not any room for misusing, misunderstanding, or missing-out. Ideally, I’d think a good platform should empower teachers to handle their difficult workload more easily…
Should also have a Teachers view, an Admin view, …
There are multiple such platforms - Canvas, ClassDojo, InfiniteCampus. Heck, you can even go with the free and open source Moodle. Most of these also integrate with useful online tools, like Desmos (graphing calculator) and PHeT (science simulations.)
This can help with workload, because you can often set up things like multiple choice quizzes that grade themselves (but how often should that be your primary way of assessing students?)
The problem is that some skills simply need to be learned with pen and paper. I have taught and tutored chemistry for years - balancing equations and stoichiometry are skills that you can’t really learn on a computer.
There’s also evidence that computer based notetaking is less effective - that students remember less.
That makes a lot of sense. I think there’s plenty of research to back up your claim about writing helping memory, too. I used to try to remember things better by (1) writing it down, (2) reading it aloud, (3) thinking about the next level up.
Number 3 is probably less useful outside fields where you’re constantly trying to “scale” systems… but in any case, it’s a thought experiment that happens to be really good at exposing the boundaries of concepts. Like… “okay, I built one server… now, what if I needed to manage a farm of 1000? What issues then become more pronounced?”
Out of curiosity, do any of these platforms try to marry itself with paper workflows? Maybe stuff like: