Tag: technology

Busy work

I’m usually pretty busy during my prep period, and today is no exception. Two students are in my room, completing forms to confirm their volunteer hours. I’m cutting out the final pieces for next period’s hexagonal thinking activity – so much cutting! – then I need to check that I have all the photocopies for every period today. I’ve already bookmarked three versions of Hamlet and found the correct starting times for today’s analysis. Once I’m done with the copies, I should have time to do some marking. I try to make the most of every minute of prep, but I am (always) woefully behind on marking, and I really want to get caught up.

I don’t even get to the photocopies because the Principal comes in and asks if I have the cords that go with the Chromebooks I dropped in his office this morning. “I thought (Colleague) gave them to you?” I say. Apparently not. And the cords are required asap. Also another Chromebook if I can manage it.

So I leave the students and my student-facing work, and I head upstairs to work on computers. Again. I already spent time on this task yesterday afternoon, but apparently steps were missed. Yes, that is the passive voice. The only active person in this scenario is me (and the other teachers drawn into this morass). There is a lot of passive nonsense.

Upstairs, I begin the tedious process of unbraiding cords from tech tubs. This gives me plenty of time to consider the idiocy of what I am doing. You see, our school has fewer students this year than last. We’re down 30 kids, I think, or maybe 50 – so we have 1150 instead of 1200 kids, more or less. As a result, Central Office, in all its wisdom, has decided that the school must return 22 Chromebooks. This seems to imply that we have a Chromebook for nearly every student in our school, but don’t be fooled: we absolutely do not. In fact, the English, Languages and Social Sciences/History departments are currently making do with 92 Chromebooks. Well, not any more; now we’re making do with 87 because the Principal has (rightly) asked each department to contribute to the culling.

You read that correctly: three ENTIRE departments – 20 teachers, plus some ESL teachers and Food Science teachers by sheer dint of proximity – are sharing 87 Chromebooks. That’s enough for three classes to use them in any given period.

We have been told repeatedly (passive voice again) that our school has “plenty” of Chromebooks – and I’m sure we do according to whatever formula the number crunchers are using – but the reality is that our school is in a neighborhood with a lot of economic insecurity, and many of our students don’t have computers they can bring with them. In fact, our (very limited) overnight Chromebooks are in such high demand that the Librarian sends out a daily list of students who borrowed one last night and therefore can’t take one home tonight. The kids have to plan their homework by the night they are possibly able to get a Chromebook.

I’ve railed against this for years. The funding model means that our students simply don’t have the same access to technology that students from richer schools do. As a result, many don’t have the skills other students might. When our students apply for the same jobs as those from richer schools, they have less practice with apps and programs. They may type less quickly. They may be less familiar with Canva or be less adept with spreadsheets. Maybe they haven’t had as much time using online research databases. They are surely less adept with AI, and they aren’t as effective at using grammar and spellchecks to perfect their work. This, in turn, puts them at a slight but real disadvantage.

But the Board wants 22 Chromebooks back, so each department has been tasked with finding a few. Oh, and the returnees have to be a specific type of Chromebook (we weren’t allowed to give back the really old ones), so department heads had to check the small print on the back of the Chromebooks we collected. I culled our Chromebooks last night.

Because the cords/ plugs are nearly as valuable as the Chromebooks themselves, and because we know how important it is not to lose anything related to Chromebooks ( it’s not like we’ll get them back), most departments have developed a system to protect the cords in each six-computer “tech tub”. We plug the cords in the power bar, shove each transformer brick and cord into the back of the tub, and put a protective piece over them. Then we take the visible cords, braid them together, stick them into a metal rod-thingy to feed them through to the Chromebooks so the cords can’t be easily taken. It’s a pain in the butt to set up, but it’s effective.

So effective, I realize, as I finally finish untangling the last cord, that I have spent much of my precious prep period on it. The bell rings, and I rush downstairs, cords in hand. I pass them to a peer tutor who runs them to the office for me before the “tech guy” comes. The deed is done.

Never fear. The School Board will have its Chromebooks back. And I will try not to think about the fact that fewer of our students will have access to technology or that this little request undoubtedly required several hours of teacher work – because I’m not the only one who had to do this. I will tell myself that these Chromebooks surely will not sit in an office somewhere or wait, piled on someone’s desk, until they are… what? redistributed? to whom? recycled? I’m sure the request seemed innocuous enough when someone who doesn’t work in an actual school decided that they really needed those 22 Chromebooks.

My peer tutor returns. In the classroom, all the students are reading. After this, they’ll spend time moving small hexagonal papers around to structure their discussion and deepen the connections they make. It’s a good activity, and it doesn’t involve any technology at all. At our school, it rarely does.

Sort of tutoring

“Miss, are we done with that thing?”

He’s caught me in the hallway between classes. I hesitate, not quite sure what to say. He bulldozes ahead, “You should come get me from class today, like maybe thirty minutes in.”

Ah-ha! He wants to continue our reading comprehension sessions. Or rather, he wants to get out of his science class for twenty minutes.

“I kind of figured you should stay in class and work on your summative project,” I say. 

“Nah,” he scoffs, “I don’t understand any of it. I’m just making stuff up.”

I relent. “Fine. I’ll see what I can do.” 

So, about thirty minutes into his Science class, I pull him out.

The project is pretty cool, if you ask me, which he didn’t. They are supposed to be creating their own habitable planet and an alien race that lives there plus some other stuff, but I don’t get a good look at the project because he’s already asking a question.

“Is there a difference between mass and density?”

I tell him to look it up.

“But if you know, why don’t you just tell me?”

I just give him a look. He asks again, gets sidetracked for a minute, and then circles back to ask one more time. Silently, I take his computer and type in “Is there a difference between mass and density”. I turn the screen back to him so he can see the bazillions of responses.

“There is! I thought so! Why didn’t you just tell me?”

I ask him what the difference is. He tells me it doesn’t matter. I refrain from making a joke about matter.

Now he wants to know why the mass of the planets is listed as x1024 and how do you type up high like that? And also what’s a good temperature? Like, you know, a neutral temperature. And why does he have to use Celsius when he’s sort of used to Fahrenheit and actually he’s not really very good with either so is 16 cold? 

I ask him if he’s talking Fahrenheit or Celsius. “Either,” he says, “I just want to know if it’s cold.”

Every time he asks a question, I help him look it up. Every time a webpage comes up, he groans and says he doesn’t want to read “all that.”

“Miss, I just want to put down easy stuff and be done,” he tells me. “Can’t you just tell me the answers?”

I tell him that if he just wanted the answers, he wouldn’t have asked me for help. He disagrees. So I don’t tell him about distance from the sun, and I make him look up if a planet can have long days and short nights and whether or not it can always be Fall. He argues with me every step of the way, right up until he tells me class is almost over and he needs to go get his stuff. 

“Fine,” I say, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice. “Do you want more help tomorrow?”

Not like you helped him today, says a little voice inside my head. I mean, we fought for many minutes about whether or not he needed to know what axial tilt is. (He does, but he refused to read the information.) Classes end in one week. We are all exhausted and ready to be done.

“Yeah,” he says, “if you have time you can come back. I like it when you help me.”

So tomorrow I will once again sit with him and refuse to either answer his questions or allow him to barge forward without thinking. I will bite my tongue, and he will be frustrated with me, but apparently we’re both good with that. 

One more week.

Hey, Siri #SOL22 18/31

(This memory came to me after reading Stacey’s slice about her son and Siri.)

He is maybe three when he discovers that the phone will converse with him. “Hey, Siri!” he says, and she always responds. Within minutes, they are best friends. She will answer any question, entertain any flight of fancy. “Would you like me to call you Alien?” she asks, and I swear her electronic voice sounds dubious. “Yes!” he agrees enthusiastically, so she does. (For years, my phone will continue to call my husband “Alien” because I can’t bring myself to change it.)

Phone in hand, Eric wanders away, chatting enthusiastically with the only one who is paying him any attention at all. We adults are in the other room, reminiscing about old times. The older kids are running about, screeching. The house is full: at least one dog, a cat, siblings, aunts, uncles, friends, grandparents. And it’s noisy – so noisy that no one really hears a three-year-old having a chat with his new electronic best friend. In fact, none of us really even know where he is until we decide to go out on the pontoon boat. “Have you seen Eric?” we ask. No. No. No. No one knows where he is.

Andre heads towards the back of the house, searching. As he passes through the living room, he hears an argument behind the couch. It sounds as though Siri is telling Eric he is being unreasonable. Just as Andre starts to chuckle, Siri stops playing around: “Ok,” she says, still with that dubious tone, “Dialing Emergency in three… two… one…” Andre lunges for the phone, but Siri is already dialing, and Andre manages to hang up just as the call goes through.

Disaster averted, Andre begins to talk to Eric when the phone rings. It’s the emergency operator who informs this flustered father holding an unhappy toddler that she is supposed to send help to the address of the phone call if the call is terminated. Andre explains. He explains about Siri, about the crowd, the noise, the child. It’s early days with Siri, but the operator understands. She does not send an emergency vehicle. We scoop Eric up, change him into a swim diaper and whisk him away to the boat. He barely notices that his friend is gone.

To this day, Siri is disabled on my phone.