- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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.
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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.
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.
… it’s a problem that’s arisen because class sizes are out of control …
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?
White flight and a state that hates education.
The rest of the science department were “emergency certified” - eg, random bachelors degrees.
I know for the fact the district has put teachers in without BACKGROUND CHECKS.
Holy shit. Lemme guess… it’s a southern state and in a majority black district?
Bingo.
First week of the job: “hey, stop talking about your college experiences with the kids. These kids are never going to college, so none of it will ever connect with them.”
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 really don’t understand why teachers need to pay for all of this…
Here in Germany (admittedly not at the forefront of digitalization) we just got to borrow school-supplied books. There were some exercise books we had to buy ourselves and at the end of the year we had to pay some 15€ for printing.
In the last three years we were allowed to bring our own laptops and tablets, which would save us the printing costs.
Other teaching material costs were always paid for by the school.
What about this does not work in the US of A?
because in the USA we hate teachers. it’s really that stupid and simple. and we hate poor people even more than we hate teachers… and most public teachers are automatically poor people due to horrible wages.
teachers are now viewed as professionals worth of respect. they are seen as losers who failed at life and deserve to be punished and hated for it. they are seen as inherently lazy for choosing it as a profession. teachers are public servants, and public servants are all leeches on society.
it was this way growing up for me, and it’s even worse today. and all our public policies and funding around education reflect this.
our society loves to go on about education, but in practice is essentially anti-education.
the last time the USA made public investments in education was post ww2, because of the Soviets. Then we rapidly clawed it all back during the 1980s and it’s been in decline for 50 years now. we did that because we had an existential threat and were in competition with the Soviets. Once we ‘won’ we no longer had any need to care about education and we essentially have a two-tier system of seduction, one for the rich that is the best in the world, and one for everyone else that is on par developing nations.
If you come here and got to spend a day in a rich school vs a poor school, your mind would be blown. One will be doing amateur rocketry, and the other can’t even do basic arithmetic or reading.
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
I disagree.
I tutored a college student who had dysgraphia. They originally had a calculator accommodation, but this was removed at the request of the instructor.
The student was in no way incapable of learning the material in the class - a remedial math course mostly on basic statistics and presenting data. But they were incapable of remembering most of the multiplication table.
There’s no reason to force a person to do long division by hand. The student was perfectly capable of understanding the process of calculating an average, but actually doing the problem meant that they were counting out by threes on their hand to do 3x7.
I’ve worked with dyslexic students on writing assignments - they are just as capable of intelligently responding to a writing prompt if you ask them verbally. Why should they be punished because they can’t spell (especially when we had like a decade of NOT TEACHING PHONICS)?
I draw a hard line at generative AI, but as long as the thoughts are theirs, I’ve never been concerned too much with students using tools to help them.
Your special needs student using a calculator has pretty much no bearing on this conversation.
Even for students without disabilities, a calculator removes the cognitive demand of the arithmetic. If I am teaching algebra, I want most of their cognition to be taken up by the algebra, not the arithmetic.
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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:
- teachers can submit a printable paper doc
- students can print it out as needed, submit the finished result
- students can take pictures of their handwritten notes and store them in a digital journal
- platform comes with handwriting analysis, full-text-search, … all that jazz?
Canvas has a very neat “annotation” tool, where the teacher can upload a document and students can write on it and submit.
I also see a lot of canvas assignments where the answer is in an auto graded quiz, but the teacher has the students take a picture and upload to show their scratch work. This can be added as a “question” to the assignment.
There are good ways to use the tools for sure - I did really like that the auto graded quizzes on canvas could use randomized numbers. Eg, when I did speed/distance/time, I could write a word problem where it would randomize the quantities so each student got a unique quiz and couldn’t cheat.
Tools like PHeT/CK12/other simulation programs are also a godsend. Even working with college chemistry, being able to show visual representations of acid/base dissociation or how to balance an equation makes things so much easier.
The platforms are great - the work flow problems are more consequent to the way the school system is set up, especially in the Title 1 hell schools that are left to fall through the cracks.
I’ve opted out of the school Chromebooks for my kids because they have computers running real GNU at home. We should all be outraged that schools are pushing a locked-down surveillance/content consumption-only platform, as opposed to something like a Raspberry Pi that actually empowers kids to have real computer literacy.
I’m curious to know if anyone here has ever approached the school IT department to ask what steps they take to mitigate or eliminate surveillance and tracking in these devices. I know it’s inherent in Google products to begin with, but do they even try? Or pretend to try? Or admit they don’t care?
The school IT department is often the math teacher’s side hustle or a badly paid gamer dude with Microsoft certifications.
Surveillance and tracking is the least of their concerns.
real GNU at home
GNU/Hurd… or GNU/Linux?
Who cares, as long as it’s copyleft?
Sounds great but I can guarantee no IT team wants to deal with this
Get Google out of our schools
That’s the one good side effect of AI, it makes people want to move away from technology where it’s not really necessary
also counterproductive, handwriting is better for retention.
From the article:
She also started a parent group with 75 members that’s asking the district to allow students to keep Chromebooks at school rather than take them home.
Seems like such a good idea to leave that at the school. I had a relative who was a teacher, she rarely ever assigned homework. She always said it was her job to teach them in those 6 hours, and the rest of the day was theirs. She did have a weekend workshop for kids that needed tutoring, and after class hours, but in general, leave school at school and be a kid.
She’s (the relative) lucky she can do that. Some districts or schools have homework policies. As I am finishing up my master’s for elementary education, if I can get away with NOT assigning homework then that’s what I will do. They are kids and need their mental breaks as well. There’s research that shows homework doesn’t correlate to better learning or growth. It’s just busy work and play is really good for kids’ minds.
If anything, I will encourage them to read and tell me what cool thing(s) they are reading about the next morning!
I wish you luck I really do. If the parents insist the kids rest of day is structured I hope they get sports, or the scouts, or maker spaces, or library, or something worthwhile.
I wish my teachers had that attitude. I got sent home with hours of homework almost every day. I particularly remember my raging bitch of an 8th grade math teacher who would assign 100s of problems a night and give you zero points if you didn’t do all of them. My mom even backed me up on arguing about that shit. If I couldn’t get it done during my study period and lunch hour I didn’t do it. I had better things to do with my time after school.
“it’s only an hour of homework!”
-Each of your 6 teachers
Then they act like I have a learning disability even though I’m acing all the tests and it’s literally just doing the bare minimum of homework that’s fucking my grades up.
We have a county near me that has just committed to doing away with Chromebook’s and going back to pen and paper. The reason being that literacy scores in that area have dropped rather significantly. I worry that whether it is literacy or technological competency students are doomed to fall in one direction or another.
It does feel like there are already countries doing this effectively and thoughtfully, its just the vast majority of them are not.
the problem with American education is cultural. other countries have stronger cultures around education.
and certain groups in America have very strong cultures around education, mostly Asians and wealthier people, but those are minorities in the broader culture which basically sees education as annoying and stupid crap they have to do to get a job, that they want to do in the cheapest way possible.
if being a teacher started at a salary of 80-100K, things would be a lot different. But it takes a decade or more of teaching to get that level of pay. The only people paid well in education are administrators, who are the ones who give themselves raises and stagnant teacher pay to their own benefit.
and it’s the same at all levels of education, because American culture says ‘be a greedy shitty person on top who enriches yourself at the expense of everyone else’. and we see the classroom as place to wage a culture war first and foremost, and education is much lower on the priority list.
Except student performance is falling across the world. What you said is the reason the US is like lower than most other western countries in outcomes. Its maybe less the reason that outcomes are getting worse across the board.
My gut says its just the reflection of a stratified global society. The billionaire and multimillionaire elites fund their schools very well while the rest struggle with collapsing budgets and parents that can’t afford quality education. So countries with more cultural education values are weathering this crisis solely from extra public funding.
The way to validate this would be to see if recent drops in education correlate to funding.
they don’t. some of the worst schools are the best funded.
it’s about culture. poor kids do great at school if they have parents who value education, or value education themselves. people who don’t value education… do poorly at school.
it’s just that rich kids/parents who don’t value it… get propped up by a community that does. it’s better to be a dumb kid in a rich school district than a smart kid in a poor district.
I think at least one class a day for some sort of technology literacy is important. Maybe some typing courses or web development or coding courses or graphic design or even how to create chat bots…
But as much as I’m into tech I agree that kids shouldn’t be staring at screens all day.
or maybe kids should learn to do that on their own free time as it interests them and focus on more basic skillsets.
you can’t code if you can’t read or do math. you can’t do graphic design if you don’t know how to draw and the basics of color theory and all that.
one of the greatest mistakes in modern usa education is forgetting the idea that skills build on one another and you can’t do more advanced things without mastering the basics first. but today we shove kids forward no matter their level of competency because we are not allowed to punish or poorly grade those who fail to learn new skills. we punish the teachers for holding the students accountable to standards, and we reward the teachers/schools who shove kids through the system and ‘innovate’ new ways for them to inflate test scores.
You’re taking what they said a fair bit further than they actually said. They said a class a day for technology literacy, and you reacted like they advocated for nothing except advanced computing.
Teaching tech literacy is part of the basics.
You can say it should be learned on their own time, but why not say that of drawing and color theory? Math, history, civics?
Some parts of primary and secondary education are about teaching you how to live in the society you’ll be living in. Technology is part of that.
Interesting thought.
I don’t know that technical comp is going to be a problem, they’re going to likely have access to a phone or tablet from a very young age. There’s nothing they need for the most part that exceeds google docs and a website that they can likely pick up quickly.
I wonder if the technical needs will slowly change over time. Companies are still full of pc’s when a keyboarded tablet would probably be fine for 9/10 of the job needs in white collar land.
I think we all know what is wrong today…
Good on those parents for advocating for their kids’ wishes!
When even the students are stressed and overwhelmed by the enshittification, that should be a glaring sign that something has to change. Humans need a break from the always-on, endless stream of digital information, especially that young.
This may be the millennial in me talking but I’ve generally found schools to be fucking dire when it comes to implementing technology in the classroom.
During Year 10 (equivalent to 9th Grade for any Yanks here), our school enrolled in a government programme to start using PDAs in the classroom. So they offered every kid in our year a Pocket LOOX 720 at a heavily subsidized price.
They were never used in lessons.
Pupils instead used them as music/video playback devices and to play games, since it was 2007, smartphones weren’t yet a thing and YouTube was just in its infancy.
Maybe things have improved since I left secondary school.
I mean, as a 90s-kid, we used to install video games and other entertainment gimmicks on our graphing calculators. That’s when kids weren’t coming to school with gameboys and walkmens, already.
I gave my high school teachers fits because I’d sit in the back of the class and read my dad’s old fantasy paperbacks - Game of Thrones, LotR, Dragonriders of Pern. They’d be annoyed to see I wasn’t grinding my way through “Crime and Punishment” or “Great Expectations”, but reluctant to object given that I was technically reading books above my grade level.
Similarly, kids in math class fucking around with Sudoku puzzles or Rubix Cubes or other math-adjacent gimmicks tend to turn teachers sideways. Especially when they’re getting middling grades on the actual material, but obviously smart enough to practice and improve.
Maybe things have improved since I left secondary school.
From my perspective, the three things that have fucked schools most over time have been
- Larger class sizes
- Teachers with less education / professional experience
- Shorter school days / school years and bigger gaps in continuous education caused by the need to start work sooner
Going back to the 1970s, professional academics have known that these are the hallmarks of a bad education system. But fixing all of them costs money. And if there’s one thing a school district hates to do, its spending money to improve education.
they are happy to spend money on technology and shiny new buildings.
they aren’t spending money on teaching staff. teaching staff who are now more credentialed than ever, but know less than ever.
the issue is the metricization of education. everything must be measured… and this creates a perverse system where everything is now about increasing the metrics, regardless of improving education.
not to mention the changing in parenting where ever parent things their child is a genius and it’s the ‘school system’ that’s failing their kid, instead of their kid being a dumbass jerk who refuses to learn or participate in their own education.
teaching staff who are now more credentialed than ever, but know less than ever.
They’re not more credentialed than ever. The days of a teacher needing a master’s degree, much less a PhD, are well behind us. Modern teachers - across both public and private sectors - can start working with as little as a GED and a state-issued teaching certificate. They don’t need a bachelor’s in their subject of expertise or in education as a degree. They don’t need to undergo an apprenticeship under a more experienced professional. They don’t need good references to land a job. All they need is a willingness to undercut existing (unionized) teaching staff and a clean criminal record.
Schools in low-budget districts onboard these green recruits in droves. Then they use the added manpower as an excuse to fire anyone on track for a pension or old enough to receive full benefits. Education has become the default job for drop-outs and victims of industry layoffs. It’s the employer of last-resort, with enormous churn, as rebounds in the job market vacuum people out as fast as downturns dump them in.
the issue is the metricization of education
Metricization is used as an excuse to conduct these wholesale purges. HISD is ground zero for this experiment in privatization, as the state takes over local school boards, fires teachers by the dozen, and consolidates students into larger and large class sizes with fewer resources.
Standardized testing is used to justify the initial purges. Then rebounds in testing (as students are purged and private testing companies manipulate exam scores) are used to validate the decisions of newly installed administrators. Don’t look at college placement or applied skills tests, just focus on Pearson’s latest “Number go down / Number go up” announcements, as the state leaders funnel more and more money to the testing companies.
By the metrics these districts are degrading and collapsing. But through propaganda, school residents are brow-beaten into doubting their own eyeballs.
not to mention the changing in parenting
You can blame “parenting” for a single kid’s mistakes.
Once you start blaming “parenting” in the aggregate, you’re inevitably full of shit.
The common denominator in these school districts isn’t “parents” and its absurd to pretend otherwise.
We didn’t have graphing calculators in school. The most we used were scientific ones which had sine, cosine, factorials, that kind of stuff.
you did if you took calculus. but only 20% of students take calclus and only 40% take pre calc.
you don’t need them for geo, tri, or algebra
We all need to do this. I’d be raising hell if my kid were in school these days. He graduated in 2016, just before things got REALLY bad.
I read /r/teachers, and I’m shocked that kids are being passed up through the grades who can barely read, and can’t focus on anything at all for more than one minute. They’re allowed to eat in class? Look at their phones? They get up and wander around, and even leave the classroom? WTF?
“Sit down! Shut up! Put the damn phone away and pay attention!”, is what I’d say right before I was fired from being a teacher, I suppose.
Other benefits of writing on paper:
- doesn’t get “accidentally” deleted
- doesn’t get “accidentally” copied
- doesn’t get uploaded to a cloud
- isn’t used to train AI
- can’t be edited or redacted by another party after the fact
It also feels good. Especially if you go out and buy a nice pen. And it gives your work a degree of object permanence.
Dogs eat it though. I’ve never heard “the dog ate my Chromebook”.
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Dunno if NBC is repositioning, pushing a tendency, or both, but glad to see the indication that parents are taking the role that should never stopped being theirs.
Parents make some good points. AI chatbot integration is too much. Its something that can actively stall learning. You need to learn the skills at school yourself to better use tools like AI. We also should avoid over exposure from screens too. Useful skill for our world، but some pen and paper can help eye strain or over stimulation.
There will be parents that give a shit about how their kids learn to learn, and there will be others that dgaf, or at least bot enough of one, to keep their kids from just mashing the easy button and using “cheats” like AI. Unfortunately plenty of the latter will get management positions.
