- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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.
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.
From my perspective, the three things that have fucked schools most over time have been
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.
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.
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.
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
Not better at all, current trend is to buy whatever services microsoft or google offers.