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.

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?

And the classic “I just took it out of my bag and it was like that”

The IT Department knows about all the problems it's the administration that does not care and won't let the IT people do anything. Also, you don't want to know how bad the procurement process is with most school systems.

Good point. I've never worked in education. I neglected the fact that they're just fulfilling orders. I believe you it's probably a shitshow with privacy and preemptive security procedures almost non-existent.

Well the latter is pretty easy, it's easier to sexually molest children that haven't gone through sex education.

yup, it's the same playbook Apple had in the 80's and 90's. Get them into schools and get everyone used to their ecosystem so they would buy their products after graduating. Bill Gates did the same thing in the 90's to outfit computer labs in schools with a bunch of Dell computers.

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!

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.

You’ve not had the right dog.

I don't work for a school, but I apply default policies to stop tracking/telemetry on all the company computers. I wasn't asked to, nor do my coworkers seem to care nearly as much. So the answer is probably that it will entirely depend on the IT admin they hired and how much they care

Of course there are kids with disabilities or nuerodivergence, and common sense should handle what is best for them individually. We're talking about broad policy here, laptops should not be the default.

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.

It's sorta the opposite. It's not that privacy and security are afterthoughts, it's that oversight and monitoring are baked into everything. They lean into lockdown browsers, mandatory on cameras for assessments, and a whole bunch of anti-cheat tech. Privacy and security are on the mind, they just want none of it.

Worse than that though, it's a carefully crafted economy where vendors knowingly supply incomplete and broken systems so that they have a continuous need to also sell professional services, training, and technical support. It's just like textbooks and curricula; crooked AF because they know that nobody is paying attention, and the entire system operates with an expectation of profound inefficiency.

They're putting AI in children's school laptops? Not only teaching them to think less, but letting a corporation directly influence them?

They get indoctrinated with all kinds of other bullshit. They can take some truth home.

Holy shit. Lemme guess.. it's a southern state and in a majority black district?

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.

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).

Christians. They deserve special treatment, because they are all special.

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.

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.”

You: I’ve pulled the ideas out my bum honestly.

Me, reading: This is intuitive genius. Seriously.

You've said your strategy essentially comes from listening/observing closely and winging it, but honestly what you're achieving just through keeping at it every way you can is amazing. Apart from not being more condensed (smaller, tighter) that handwriting is actually more legible than I've seen from more than a few adults, including the slight nod to the presence of lines. I am not exaggerating.

Your creativity and temerity are both inspiring. Your son is lucky to have you.

Sure, you can do that once. Then you are out the job. Talking about politics will get you in more trouble than raping a kid.

I went into teaching because I care about making the world a better place. It cost me my marriage, it has sunk me into some of the deepest pits of despair that my mental health could take, it has meant physical and verbal abuse.

Buying pencils for kids is the kind of thing that you don’t mind too much, because at least it is a problem you can fix.

Once, I had a student ask me for a pencil. (He’d ask me everyday - usually in response to me asking why he wasn’t doing his work.) He looked me in the eye, snapped it in half, and asked for another.

I gave it to him. Who cares. I couldn’t fix the sinks which didn’t work and stunk because kids shoved shit into them, but I could fix the fucking pencil.

It’s a terrible job where you are expected to save the world and hated for everything you do. But, as a dog returns to his vomit... It’s part of my soul.

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.

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.

They are Chromebooks. A gigantic corporation is already influencing them?

You got that boomer energy.

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.

Kids have two options. Out dated propaganda, or propaganda that might hallucinate a few key details.

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.

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."

Well obviously the propaganda I grew up with is better and clearly didn't affect me at all..

This would have made our lives so much better.

Sounds great but I can guarantee no IT team wants to deal with this

Who cares, as long as it's copyleft?

It's happening.

I’ve asked about this a few times and I was told by our administration that every company we work with signs a data privacy agreement stating that they will not sell or compromise any sensitive student data. But I was also told that our administration team doesn’t usually follow up with these companies to make sure they’re following the rules. Therefore it’s an unfortunate situation of, “above my pay grade.” Also, when opting out of a Chromebook, you’re only making sure your kid doesn’t go home with one. Most, if not all, teachers don’t shy away from Google Classroom…

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.

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?

I did! The IT department literally laughed at me. I also tried to get them to let teachers install uBlock Origin, because they apparently will watch educational YouTube videos in class sometimes, and then get random ads for everyone to suffer under. But uBlock Origin doesn't have their support... Ironically, they only support Windows computers and iPhones on the school network. Android, MacOS, and Linux are all officially unsupported.

Same!!! I have the auditory thingy and dyslexia, so writing (words, not math) was hell on earth for me for most of highschool. Getting to use a laptop in 11th and 12th grade was a godsent.

But in 10th grade I actually did something that mostly solved my hatred of handwriting: I taught myself calligraphy and whole-arm-writing. Now I love handwriting, don't have pain doing it anymore, people compliment my writing, etc.

Though I still can't listen to stuff while writing 🤷 luckily I was able to use a laptop in lectures (philosophy is very notes heavy), and after college it becomes irrelevant, thank god.

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.

Fountain pens for the win, nothing as nice as writing cursive with a good, wet fountain pen. I learned in primary and hated it, and then got obsessed with calligraphy in 10th grade and got a proper fountain pen and good ink and fell in love with the experience.

Learning to write well is really wonderful. I wish I had learned properly in school, instead of having to teach myself. I will teach my offspring, though! If I ever have any — not looking so promising in the current climate. As in political, but also climate change.

Its working exactly as intended.

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

Are Chromebooks screens that bad?

Can't wait until it happens at work.

Oh wait, it's not, and this is dumb?

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.