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Comment on Parents opt kids out of school computers, insisting on pen-and-paper instead

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.

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LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
What the fuck is it with schools being stingy with printed paper. At scale its less than a cent a sheet

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- andros_rex@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Lemming6969@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    So you save 100 in taxes and pay 500 in printing costs… You’re down 400 for supplying your employer. Lol
    
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    andros_rex@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    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!
    
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    Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    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.
    
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- Mirshe@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  So many donations and funds for schools are earmarked, you can only spend them in specific ways. If you spend them in ways that don’t align with the earmark, it’s incredibly easy for the donors or the state to claw them back. So that $40mil your local suburban school district spent on a new football stadium? That was likely earmarked SPECIFICALLY for football, they can’t really just swish the money to better textbooks, or whatever. Same with tech funding - you get $250k to upgrade your school district with Chromebooks or whatever, you MUST buy within what the funding packet tells you you can buy, and you can’t really do anything else with it.
  
  That doesn’t even get into the cartelization of textbooks and school software. There’s so few real options that it’s incredibly easy for these companies to collude without really looking like it’s collusion.
  
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- SinningStromgald@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Teachers where I live are constantly asking for donations of basic school supplies, snacks, tissues, and cleaning supplies for classrooms. It is incredibly disheartening.
  
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homura1650@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

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- Mirshe@lemmy.world ⁨55⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  All of those are MORE expensive, at scale. If you can just hand 1500 kids a $200 Chromebook that fulfills ALL those functions, that’s $300k, vs 1500 e-ink readers at $40 a pop, 1500 digital typewriters @ $100 apiece, etc. Hell, that scientific calculator ALONE might be $200+ in some markets because Texas Instruments practically has the market cornered (to the point that I had to go to the administration of my school district to show them that the Casio I had was functionally identical).
  
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ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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

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foodandart@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

… 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…

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- andros_rex@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - foodandart@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    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?
    
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    andros_rex@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    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.
    
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Eq0@literature.cafe ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

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partofthevoice@lemmy.zip ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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:

what’s the curriculum for today

what was yesterdays homework

what was yesterdays lesson

what tests are coming up

what’s my personal attendance

what’s for lunch today

…

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, …
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- andros_rex@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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.
  
  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.
  
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  - partofthevoice@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    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?
    
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    andros_rex@lemmy.world ⁨31⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
    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.
    
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