Oh, technology. How I do often loathe thee. I find that in this incredibly high-tech world, sometimes we are too reliant upon it. Take yesterday and today as examples. Yesterday, the seventh graders were writing final drafts of their essays in the computer lab. The teacher asked them to submit it to the automatic grading program of Holt (textbook maker) in addition to printing them out for her to grade. As long as she is also grading them herself, I have no problem with this. However, the problem arises after the score is shown to the student submitting that paper, particularly if the student is already unmotivated to begin with. The essays are graded on a 1-4 scale. Theoretically, if students get less than a 3 or 4, they should edit it. But it has appeared to me that most students don't care what their grades are. They just want to finish. So it does no good for most of them to see their score. In fact, it probably hinders them because they may think, "Oh, I got a one out of four. I'm stupid. Whatever." And that's really the complete opposite point of school.
Today was even worse in terms of technology. The eighth grade reading class does a program called Journeys, which is supposed to supplement the lessons in their textbooks. I can't say how beneficial the program is since I'm not familiar with it, but today it was useless because the laptops they were logging into to use were ridiculously slow. When the teacher was getting ready to dismiss them, several students had just gotten the program up. Talk about a waste of class time. Sometimes technology cripples us, and teachers need to learn how to do things without technology just in case something goes wrong (and it will).
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