- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- news@lemmy.world
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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Get Google out of our schools
Stopping the childern from using tech is not wise. As well stopping the children from using pen and paper is not a good idea. We live in this century, both is needed. By using paper and pen kids learn much more than just writing itself. Also the style of letters they write matters a lot. Most of the poeple can write just characters that look like from a printed book. You can check the studies to read what that does to your brain.
While I agree with you, I’m not sure Chromebooks should count as “using tech” for the sake of learning. If you really want to give a younger generation experience with technology there are far better systems for them to learn on.
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.
Computers have nothing to do with it. It’s everything to do with curriculum requirements and the lack of explorative reading thanks to standardized testing. Other countries like China, Taiwan, and Finland have been able to adopt technology with no loss in reading literacy. It’s because they have focused, thought out integration and not just slapdash by whatever corporation gives them the best deal.
I totally agree though. It seems like right now either kids are stuck in front of a computer with no prep or any other supplemental education, or they’re completely unplugged and unprepared for interacting with technology outside of an iPhone.
I have a few family members that are teachers or work in education at some capacity and would absolutely agree the curriculum requirements and standardized testing have become a barrier. Though I am not an expert in education I was a student and can attest to the fact that these things stand in the way of educators being able to reach all students. These education programs are not designed to reach students that learn differently from the vast majority of students. When it comes to reducing exposure to technology in schools it would be foolhardy to double down on either direction. Technology and literacy should coincide and neither should replace the other. A little bit of moderation and balance goes a long way. Today’s society and politics focus on a nose to the grindstone, devil may care rate of progress which though fast and traditionally the American way is unfortunately full of holes and mistakes that are only noticed in hindsight.
Absolutely. My spouse is a teacher and I have many friends who are, too. I see it every day. The “good” teachers use technology to the benefit of themselves and the students, using it when appropriate and when best applicable. No doubt there are teachers and students out there who use it as a crutch. Like you said though, we need to be able to switch between analog and digital, figuring out when either is better suited.
I play RPGs. I do all of my characters and planning and stuff with pencil and paper. I do a lot of my GM work digitally. You need to be able to do both today, or else you’re not going to be prepared for adulthood.
It’s everything to do with curriculum requirements and the lack of explorative reading thanks to standardized testing.
The Pineapple And The Hare: Can You Answer Two Bizarre State Exam Questions?
spoiler
In the olden times, animals could speak English, just like you and me. There was a lovely enchanted forest that flourished with a bunch of these magical animals. One day, a hare was relaxing by a tree. All of a sudden, he noticed a pineapple sitting near him.
The hare, being magical and all, told the pineapple, “Um, hi.” The pineapple could speak English too.
“I challenge you to a race! Whoever makes it across the forest and back first wins a ninja! And a lifetime’s supply of toothpaste!” The hare looked at the pineapple strangely, but agreed to the race.
The next day, the competition was coming into play. All the animals in the forest (but not the pineapples, for pineapples are immobile) arranged a finish/start line in between two trees. The coyote placed the pineapple in front of the starting line, and the hare was on his way.
Everyone on the sidelines was bustling about and chatting about the obvious prediction that the hare was going to claim the victory (and the ninja and the toothpaste). Suddenly, the crow had a revolutionary realization.
“AAAAIEEH! Friends! I have an idea to share! The pineapple has not challenged our good companion, the hare, to just a simple race! Surely the pineapple must know that he CANNOT MOVE! He obviously has a trick up his sleeve!” exclaimed the crow.
The moose spoke up.
“Pineapples don’t have sleeves.”
“You fool! You know what I mean! I think that the pineapple knows we’re cheering for the hare, so he is planning to pull a trick on us, so we look foolish when he wins! Let’s sink the pineapple’s intentions, and let’s cheer for the stupid fruit!” the crow passionately proclaimed. The other animals cheered, and started chanting, “FOIL THE PLAN! FOIL THE PLAN! FOIL THE PLAN!”
A few minutes later, the hare arrived. He got into place next to the pineapple, who sat there contently. The monkey blew the tree-bark whistle, and the race began! The hare took off, sprinting through the forest, and the pineapple … It sat there.
The animals glanced at each other blankly, and then started to realize how dumb they were. The pineapple did not have a trick up its sleeve. It wanted an honest race — but it knew it couldn’t walk (let alone run)!
About a few hours later, the hare came into sight again. It flew right across the finish line, still as fast as it was when it first took off. The hare had won, but the pineapple still sat at his starting point, and had not even budged. The animals ate the pineapple.
1. Why did the animals eat the pineapple? a. they were annoyed b. they were amused c. they were hungry d. they wanted to 2. Who was the wisest? a. the hare b. moose c. crow d. owlThis is from 2012. You can’t even pin this on LLM hallucinations.
Without reading the article(and therefore knowing the desired answer):
No one actually explained why they ate the pineapple. I would say that they wouldn’t have eaten the pineapple due to their amusement, but “annoyed” can be inferred, “hungry” is possible since it’s been a few hours, and “they wanted to” is fine.
As for wisdom, I would argue that the owl(“the” implying that the owl is real, in my interpretation, because I want it to mean that) is the wisest for not having attended this foolish event which wasted everyone else’s time. The hare raced a fruit, the crow had a decent idea but was foolish to claim it so decisively, and the moose couldn’t understand the intention behind a common saying. Of course, the question is about who is the most wise, not about who is wise, so foregoing the owl idea it’s a whole other thing.
Just gotta read the article now and figure out if I’m supposed to be dumb for even trying or whatever lol
No one actually explained why they ate the pineapple.
This is why I look sideways at the “Americans only read at a 6th grade level” statistics. Because technically speaking you should be able to derive this answer from the content of the story without having it explicitly laid out. Only, the standardized question adds so much incoherent fluff to the narrative as to make deriving the answer ambiguous at best.
As for wisdom, I would argue that the owl is the wisest for not having attended this foolish event
This still feels like a trick answer, because “owls are wise” is a cultural trope not included in the story itself in any meaningful way.
You could argue the crow is the wisest for discerning the possibility of a trick. And then you could argue that wisdom is not synonymous with correctness to justify why the crow was savvy but still wrong.
You might argue that the moose is the wisest, because it was able to identify the moral of the story in advance.
You might argue the hare is the wisest, because it knew it could win a race against a pineapple.
But all of this would need to be laid out in an actual fully-written argument. It’s not the sort of answer you can pick out of a multiple choice exam. It’s the a debate you can have between peers where the analysis of the work is more valuable than the final selection.
Just gotta read the article now and figure out if I’m supposed to be dumb for even trying or whatever lol
The story is highlighted precisely because it is nebulous and confusing. I suspect the authors of the question intended it to create the illusion of a weed out question by guaranteeing a low success rate at selecting the answer.
But you could achieve the same results by asking “What side will a coin land on if I flip it?” a. Heads, b. Tails, c. The Edge, d. The Coin will not land
Since there’s no explicitly correct answer, you are - at best - going to get a roughly even distribution of answers between a. and b. Then you get to report up to your bosses that you’re filtering out a certain number of students as “failures” without interrogating why they failed or what you’re even testing them to do.
Yea, after read the original story shown in the article there was certainly better writing. Like the moral that you shouldn’t back someone just because you think they must be smarter than to challenge a runner to a foot race while having nary a leg in sight. Oh, and I went right by, on purpose, the wise owl trope. But yes, it’s likely there as an answer for that reason.
The whole situation’s a mess. I often get in trouble, even at 30 years old, for “asking too many questions” or wanting more detail. Even in French class yesterday the teacher was asking us to form opinions on headlines and I was arguing because I cannot form an opinion based on a headline. I understand the exercise was a language one, but it still matters.
That story feels like someone was enraged by ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’ while writing it.
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.
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.
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.
It’s also a BIG privacy issue.
Unfortunately even this will have to be another battle because there is a lot of monied interest in shoving all these shitty devices down schools throats.
If something is clearly doing harm but no one is stopping it, then it’s because someone is making money off of it.
It feels like fiddling with the aesthetics of schooling rather than addressing the fundamentals. The idea that a computer terminal is bad for literacy doesn’t seem to match out with empirical evidence.
If something is clearly doing harm but no one is stopping it, then it’s because someone is making money off of it.
People make money coming and they make money going. I don’t think it is reasonable to say “profit exists, therefore problems”, as a lot of these prescriptions and changes are non-scientific and populist-driven at the outset. Whether they work or not isn’t really the goal. Political outsiders simply need to establish a scapegoat to pin on their incumbent opponents in order to sell their own ascendancy to office.
If you can campaign on undoing harm, cool. You’ll do it. But if you just need to throw darts and hope you hit something, blaming “the kids today and their computers” is as good a vector for attack as anything.
Not as though selling kids school supplies, hard cover textbooks, and other more traditional school trappings wasn’t profitable enough forty years ago.
I don’t think it is reasonable to say “profit exists, therefore problems”
Good thing nobody said that then.
Not as though selling kids school supplies, hard cover textbooks, and other more traditional school trappings wasn’t profitable enough forty years ago.
blah blah blah “text book industry gets to extort students then it’s fine for the tech bros to do it now too.”
Nope. It’s not okay.
text book industry gets to extort students then it’s fine for the tech bros to do it now too.
Good thing nobody said that then.
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.
Something like an introduction to unix and programming should be mandatory. They seem to think that kids need to “learn to use a computer and the internet.” It’s a fucking point-and-click interface. What is there to learn? The software industry is very skilled at making it all so easy that a chimpanzee can use it. You don’t even need to read a manual. I wonder if this is all a holdover from the 70s when the computer interface was likely to be a paper teletype which is naturally difficult to use without instruction. We’re living in the future. Teach the difficult stuff. The teachers need a wetware update.
Kids back in the eighties were coding in BASIC, running command line prompts and using home computers like the ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC 464 and Commodore 64. The most I did in terms of coursework for my IT classes during my secondary school days was make a personal webpage about my hobbies & interests using Microsoft Frontpage. Sixth form (where I did A Level Computing, basically 11th & 12th Grade equivalents) was even worse, It was 2010 and they were still fucking teaching us Visual Basic 6 and the Waterfall Model of system development!
Something like an introduction to unix and programming should be mandatory. They seem to think that kids need to “learn to use a computer and the internet.” It’s a fucking point-and-click interface. What is there to learn? The software industry is very skilled at making it all so easy that a chimpanzee can use it.
This may be infuriating or sad for you to read, but very young kids who have been brought up on smartphones, TikTok and YouTube Kids these days can’t even do basic shit like this. Like, I’ve genuinely heard about kids starting kindergarten and reception who cannot even turn pages on a book and try to swipe left/right on them like they’re a touchscreen. Some even struggle to work with a physical keyboard or a gamepad that actually has tactile inputs.
The only other group where I’ve personally seen such ineptitude with technology is in old people. I used to work in customer support for a major right-wing British newspaper, and it was mainly things like website account access issues, basic tablet/smartphone tech support, and promotion enquiries I dealt with. I genuinely hated that job for a lot of reasons, but a big part of it is that trying to guide a senile 75+ year old pensioner through a basic password reset or explain how to redeem an e-voucher.
My dad is 80 years old and as the younger autistic one in the family who got economically screwed and is still living with my parents, I’m left with having to continually explain how to do basic email or phone tasks to him.
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
Not better at all, current trend is to buy whatever services microsoft or google offers.
Right tool for the job. Teach the kids how to use technology to their advantage and when not to go for a laptop.
That said pen and paper is a relatively recent invention too.
That plasma giving everyone headaches now
It’s happening.
Can’t wait until it happens at work.
Oh wait, it’s not, and this is dumb?
Every one of these parents uses technology in their work, I’m betting. They’re seeing their kids up to be under prepared for the future. These are probably the same parents who complain that they don’t teach cursive in schools anymore.
Brother, I became a software engineer and I didn’t use a laptop for classes until college. Shoving Microsoft and Google products down school kids’* throats does nothing to “prepare them for the future”.
And for those people who don’t become engineers? What about those kids who don’t have access to a computer outside of the phone in their pocket? If we want to increase computer literacy, it has to be in schools because it’s definitely not going to be at home in the vast majority of cases.
We don’t need kids going analog unless they choose a career path in a computer-related field. We need schools to be teaching proper computer and media literacy to prepare them not only for a work future, but a media future filled with AI slop and grifters. Not teaching them these valuable skills is how we get kids in their 20s right now getting their news from a fish on tiktok.
Kids are already coming out of school computer illiterate. They know how to use specific applications, but don’t know things like directory hierarchy. Onboarding young people into working with general office productivity like SharePoint, or giving them a real grown up laptop instead of an ipad is like teaching boomers to open PDFs all over again. All the same old training and helpdesk calls.
the solution is the same as it was 30 years ago: computer class where they deep dive into how the things work, not just how Microsoft and Apple decide the things are used.
I don’t disagree. We need better computer literacy programs in school. But removing technology from learning 100% isn’t the alternative. Those parents are still probably going to stick an unregulated, fully accessible iPhone in their kids hands where they’re going on Instagram and tiktok with no media literacy skills. How is that any better?
Ah, you don’t understand nuance, I see.
Go back and reread my comment, then reply to me when you’re ready to engage with what I actually said, and not a bunch of scary strawmen you’ve built.
How did I miss the point? You said you didn’t use a computer in school until college, and then you talked about shoving mainstream bloatware into kids eyes. I don’t see how I missed those points. I’m also assuming when you went to college was a different point on time than it is right now. As you know, a lot has changed in the computer and online scene in the last 6 years, and exponentially moreso in the last 3.
Alright I’ll spell it out for you. For some context, the article in the post (which you probably didn’t read) describes how schools are sending tablets and laptops home with elementary and middle school children. I specifically stated that I didn’t use a laptop for school until I was in college, and implied that my technology literacy did not suffer despite such “late exposure”.
I did not say that I didn’t use a computer until college. You made that up. I’m not advocating to remove all technology from school. That’s a strawman you’ve built to argue against. I used computers all throughout my time in school, starting in like 2nd grade. We had these things called computer labs, where a teacher that specialized in technology would teach us the ins and outs of using a computer, how to be safe on the internet, and provide adult supervision and guidance. In middle school, we had designated computer lab time to work on book reports, lab reports, research projects, etc. I carried a usb stick around with me to save things onto, which I would then take home, where I could continue working on my assignments on our family computer. My parents established rules and boundaries for using the home computer, and were another resource I could go to for help and guidance.
But we also wrote stuff down. Like with pencils, on paper. And had teachers up at the front of the room giving lectures, helping us through example problems, teaching. That was the primary way we learned. We weren’t sent home with an iPad and some edutainment games and told “good luck!” like the kids described in the posted article.
I’ll say it again, but I’ll reword it in more plain language so there’s less chance of misunderstanding: sending school children home with corpoware-riddled tablets and laptops with little to no guidance and expecting them to use that for the bulk of their schoolwork (the thing described in the article) is not a good way to foster technology literacy.
You know what apparently you didn’t work on during school? Basic discussion techniques and the ability to be civil.
Please point out where I wasn’t civil or demonstrated a lack of conversational ability
Know what’s better than learning something? Learning a second way to do it. Learning cursive has more benefits than simply being able to read/write it.
Kid’s brains are sponges and multiple studies over the years all show a direct correlation with learning more/varied things at an early age drastically increases the ability to keep learning later in life.
Again, I don’t disagree. That’s yet another reason why cutting technology out of the learning experience will only hinder development.
You have a point; however, it is important to balance out the skills which are technology enabled and those that are physical. In an educational system IT would be a subject dedicated for this kind of thing.
Children, teenagers and others should absolutely be prepared for the digital world. But that means having a balanced curriculum that enables the usage of devices if so desired. Of course, that also means they should be prepared for analog life as handwriting for example, is a translational skill that is essential.
I don’t disagree at all. However, no kid can go tech free in school and be prepared for any sort of productive existence afterwards. Yes, that sucks. Yes, it also sucks that the majority of our experience is measured in productivity. But that’s capitalism. I wish it weren’t that way.
These parents certainly aren’t going to prepare to prepare their kids for a digital future. Heck, they’re probably falling for the same AI garbage their kids are going to fall victim to. Just like everything else, literacy needs to be part of the school curriculum.
I really don’t know why a bunch of people savvy enough to be on a federated social platform are so against this. It’s bonkers to me.
Public education either needs to be reclaimed and rebuilt from all the corrupting influences that have torn it apart. I’m not worried about the children of intelligent people, who can fall back on enrichment provided by their families, but so many kids are, at best, getting left behind or worse, being indoctrinated with all sorts of corpo-fascism now inherent in the system. Most kids seem to be coping pretty alright, so far, but I worry about the trends, and the future.
First off, congratulations on posting the comment you were working on instead of deciding you didn’t care enough to hit send. Second, I’ve done exactly what you’ve done, so if I’m a pedant I’m also a hypocrite. Third, I’m really really curious; what was the “or” half of the either/or statement you started at the beginning of your post? Or did autocorrect change really to either? Inquiring minds want to know
I empathize with your curiosity. I frequently have symptoms of ADHD and my mind goes places and comes back without ever telling me where it’s been. It’s a chaotic place and I don’t always know either. Reading the context, I suspect what I was probably considering saying was suggesting the alternative is focusing on promoting homeschooling and auto-didactic learning as much as possible, until I realized that’s not really a scalable or suitable solution to the concern I was starting with. So the thought got axed.
At first I was like “how do they know I have ADHD?” And then I was like, “oh wait, they’re saying they have ADHD.” My people! Also, I hear you and agree
They’re putting AI in children’s school laptops? Not only teaching them to think less, but letting a corporation directly influence them?
Its working exactly as intended.
They are Chromebooks. A gigantic corporation is already influencing them?
There’s a big difference between “hey kids, use this machine, it has Internet access and Brand products” and “hey kids, ask me anything you’d like, and I’ll give you the Brand approved answer.”
Kids have two options. Out dated propaganda, or propaganda that might hallucinate a few key details.
Well obviously the propaganda I grew up with is better and clearly didn’t affect me at all…
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.
Because at some point you feel alone vs the system and you either burn out or decide to move with the flow and pass the problem to the next person in line which is… the system.
In my school it feels like half of the parents are overprotective and if you mention anything negative towards their kid, they take it personally so you have to ask the question… is it worth the trouble for the money you are given.
Personal experience: teaching in most elite school in my area and everything looks bleak. So I just focus on the few willing to learn and rest can go kick rocks for all I care as long as they know how to behave… and even that is a tall order in some cases. Every time I kick a student from class for being disruptive in class I expect a call from angry parent how wrong I am and how much of an angel their kid is.
Are Chromebooks screens that bad?
Teacher here: In my classroom I’m purposely moving towards pen and paper. Each middle schooler has a Chromebook and it has wrecked their brains (along with social media and phones that they are on outside of school.) You leave them to do an assignment and they will be on a game in 10 seconds unless you keep on them. Tech needs to be used, but right now it is killing any curiosity and stamina for learning that they have left.
You leave them to do an assignment and they will be on a game in 10 seconds unless you keep on them.
Why even have games in them? If I am an entrepreneur, a school notepad or laptop without games is a good business idea…
School Chromebooks don’t come with games, except for the “No Internet Game” which is baked into Chrome. The games being used are web games. Schools have blocking agents, but the websites mutate faster than the blocking software. (Looking at you .io domains)
My school eventually deployed software that only allows students on teacher approved sites, a “block all BUT…” rule and the little devils learned that if they opened more than 50 tabs that agent stopped filtering. I’ve also had students buy an identical Chromebook to their school issued one and use a hotspot to bypass all detection and filtering.
Just like everything in life, uncooperation means the system is broken in some way. This is not about being assertive enough so that children, teenagers or adult students will have to live off the current tyrrany - but realising that this system is designed to encourage this.
The students no matter the age know best; and in this case their word, that AI has no place in their education, should be obeyed by the ones truly ignorant of the educational system.
The internet is full of games
Maybe they’re just sick of staring at screens, and the Chromebook screen was the thing they hated the most because of the activities associated with it. Plus if you’re using it for most school work, a kid would be likely to be staring at that longer than their phone or other devices at home.
Maybe, way worse than their screens though, is the fact that they run
chromeBootlickerOS.
said she was only allowed under state law to opt the children out of standardized testing and sexual health lessons,
WTF? Why the fuck can someone opt kids out of EITHER of these things?
There’s an argument to be made against standardized testing. Very neurodivergent individuals, for example, can suffer a lot under bad standardized tests. Idk, though, it would be better to just make a better system, rather than letting people opt out. As long as that’s not happening, there is, however, an argument against standardized tests.
Christians. They deserve special treatment, because they are all special.
Well the latter is pretty easy, it’s easier to sexually molest children that haven’t gone through sex education.
I think this heavily depends. Sex education for a lot of places, especially in rural areas, tends to be fucked up backwards and downright harmful. Last I checked several states have abstinence only sex ed and do things like show kids a bunch of pictures of STDs and leverage scare tatics to deter them from having sex. I think opting out of that shit show and having a candid conversation with your kid about sex is probably the ethical thing to do in those places.
