Concerns of the week

Last year, our youngest son was homeschooled all year and our oldest son went to school for 3 classes & did the other 4 classes at home. This year, our oldest is at the high school for 6 classes & he does 2 at home. Our youngest went back to public school full-time. He's very VERY social. He met with other kids a minimum of 3 times a week last year during homeschool-1 day for a whole day of school, 1 day for 1/2 day activity, and then going to church activities one night a week but he felt like that wasn't even close to enough and I thought it took a lot of time and effort managing that much. We gave him a choice to homeschool or try public again and he wanted to try public again and he is actually really loving it. He started in a school that is brand new this year. They gave each student a Chromebook to keep with them for 7th-9th grade. It comes home every day, goes back to school every day. My concern was privacy but there were some great tutorials about how to disable a lot of trackers and I felt a lot more comfortable. If I sound crazy-ha ha-you have no idea! :)

This week I had a chance to substitute at my youngest son's school two days in a row and it was my first time being there. Some interesting things are going on there that aren't happening in other schools. The biggest problem is that a large percentage of students cannot put their Chromebooks away. I will make a very specific announcement about not wanting to see them and 10 minutes later 5 Chromebooks will be out. I will make another announcement and if I'm lucky 1 student will put it away. This doesn't happen in other schools because other schools have a classroom set of Chromebooks and students don't feel personal ownership of them. It would be weird for them to go grab a Chromebook if the teacher doesn't ask them to but at this school, students only have to reach into their backpack to access a Chromebook they feel ownership of. In addition, more students are playing games on the Chromebook instead of doing the assignment. Because they can use it at home, they install games and they know what games are available at all times so they don't feel as many restrictions. Some of the 7th grade classes I taught had to take an assessment, which came after an assignment they needed their Chromebooks for, and it literally took about 10 minutes for all of the Chromebooks to be put away. The kids have an unhealthy attachment to these things. In most schools, there is a widespread problem with phones and I did have some problems with kids using their phones during class but that is a smaller problem than their addiction to the Chromebooks. This was very eye-opening to me about what's going on at that school.

In all of the middle & high schools I've been in this year, many students have handwriting that is nearly unreadable. They use keyboards so much more than they use physical writing that they are not mastering how to write something another person can read and nobody is holding them accountable. I see students that need to be entertained. If you are not teaching them something they enjoy or giving them an assignment they enjoy, they refuse to participate and they pull out their phones or use their Chromebooks in alternative ways, using them to be entertained instead of learning anything. They demand to be entertained or they will disengage completely and there's no middle ground. Turning people into functional human beings is not just fun and games. There is hard work involved and it concerns me how few are willing to do the work. I think the thing that concerns me more is that parents as a whole are clueless about all of this. I hear about employees who contact parents concerning their student's excessive use of phones during school and a common response is "teenagers and their phones. That's just something they do at this age." Another response that I hear too much is "Well, what can I really do?" Parents know there's a problem but they give up without even trying to solve the problem. Without parent support, teenagers have no accountability because their poor choices are now widely acceptable, at least to other teenagers and to many adults. There's a good reason why teenagers don't run the world or at least why they're not supposed to. I'm DEEPLY concerned about how few of students have mastered multiplication, even by middle school. There's a widespread belief that there's no point. Most people have constant access to calculators. I wish I could spread understanding about how teaching your brain to do math makes your brain capable of so many non-math-related things that make it necessary for being a functional human. I'm not even talking about trigonometry or calculus, just basic multiplication. It's a life skill. If you emerge from school unable to perform basic equations, how do you figure out in black and white when you're being overcharged for something or how to find the best deal on anything you buy in sizes or quantities? How do you even think about computing life problems to come up with solutions?

I wish I had some hopeful thing to end my concerns on. I guess I'm glad I saw the inner workings of my son's school so I can have very targeted conversations with him about my concerns and so I know what problems to address that he could possibly fall prey to embracing. There are some fantastic students out there and my heart is always softened by kind and thoughtful acts I do see amidst the trouble so there is still plenty of wonderful things going on at school as well.