The Ed-Tech Fight I Got Dragged Into At Last Night’s PTA Meeting
I still have crumbs of that stale lemon cookie from the gym folding table in my tote bag, right next to my lesson plan notebook and a half-used tube of hand sanitizer that smells like fake lavender. My sneakers still stick a little from the spilled root beer by the gym door, too. I only went to last night’s PTA because I owed the principal a favor—she covered my class when my own kid had a fever last month, so I couldn’t say no. I figured it’d be the usual stuff: fundraising for the eighth grade trip, arguing about the new lunch line that’s always 20 people long. I didn’t expect to leave in the middle of a shouting match about banning every piece of ed-tech from the building.
The woman who brought the ban up is Sarah, her son Jax is in my first period math. I know Jax—he’s the kid who always hides a pack of Sour Patch Kids in his hoodie pocket and forgets his lunch at least once a week. Sarah pulled up a screenshot on her phone, passed it around the folding table, and it was exactly what she said it was: Jax’s school iPad, mid-scroll through TikTok, during my lesson on linear equations. The school’s browser filter isn’t great, I’ll admit that. She talked about how he goes to bed with the iPad under his pillow, gets migraines twice a week, can’t even write a full sentence on paper anymore because he does everything on a screen. She said schools bought into all this shiny tech just to look good to the school board, and now our kids are paying for it, and it needs to be gone entirely. By the time she finished, half the room was clapping so hard the folding tables shook.
Then all the teachers in the room started talking over each other, and I was one of them. We said it was an insane idea, that you can’t just yank all tech out of classrooms now, that we rely on it for things that actually matter. I thought of Mia, my student with dysgraphia who can’t hold a pencil long enough to write a paragraph without her hand cramping so bad she cries. The speech-to-text tool on her school laptop is the only reason she doesn’t fail every assignment. I thought of the kids that get free breakfast and lunch through the school, whose families can’t afford a computer at home—this is the only reliable access they get. I thought of grading: ten years ago I’d take home 120 math tests every other Friday, stay up until 1am marking them, miss my own kid’s bedtime story. Now I spend half that time grading, and I can actually write meaningful notes on every paper instead of just scribbling a number. Mr. Henderson, who’s been teaching here longer than I’ve been alive, banged his cane on the floor and said anyone who suggests going back to grading 150 handwritten essays by hand over a weekend is out of their mind. Then he knocked over the water pitcher, and we all spent five minutes passing crumpled napkins while water pooled on the linoleum. That’s when it got awkward, everyone was red in the face, and I suddenly realized I didn’t agree with everything I’d just yelled 10 minutes earlier.
Because the parents are right about so much of it. I spend 20 minutes every morning troubleshooting Wi-Fi, not teaching. Last week the whole district’s learning platform went down for three hours mid-day, and I had to dig out a stack of worksheets from the back of my closet that had 2018 test questions on one side and a district holiday menu on the back. Half the worksheets didn’t have staples, so kids were chasing loose papers around the room while I stood there feeling stupid. The district makes me use three different apps for attendance, grades, and behavior logs, and none of them sync, so I have to type the same kid’s name three times every single day. I’ve had kids fail participation because they forgot to charge their iPad overnight—their little sibling used it to watch Peppa Pig, their parents work night shift and didn’t notice, and suddenly that kid loses 10 points from their grade. I hate that. I can’t just give them a piece of paper and let them do it that way, either, because the district says all work has to be digital for “accountability.”
I drove home last night thinking about it, and this morning I’m sitting here drinking cold coffee, waiting for first period to start, and I still don’t know what the right answer is. The thing no one said last night is that most of the bad ed-tech isn’t the teachers’ fault, and it’s not the parents’ fault—it’s the people at the top who buy whatever shiny new app the salesman is selling that year, because it gets them a grant, it makes the school look good on paper, no one asks us teachers if it actually works for our kids. If we banned all ed-tech, we’d be throwing out the good stuff that actually helps kids like Mia, the stuff that keeps me from burning out by October. But if we just keep going the way we are, we’re ignoring Sarah and all the other parents who are watching their kids get more screen time than any human should have, who are right that a lot of what we use is just useless busywork.
I don’t have a neat ending for this. No big takeaway, no perfect solution. Today I’ll use Kahoot for algebra review, and I’ll keep the stack of un-stapled old worksheets in my closet for the kids that forget their iPads or just get headaches from staring at a screen all morning. I’ll agree with Sarah that the TikTok loophole needs to get fixed, and I’ll agree with Mr. Henderson that banning every piece of tech is insane. No one’s gonna fix this anytime soon, right? The district’s already talking about buying a new $200,000 reading app next year, even though 70% of us surveyed said we don’t need it. I’ll just keep remembering to remind kids to charge their devices, and keep the extra worksheets tucked away, and that’s all I can do. I gotta go, first period’s about to start, and I still need to log attendance in three different apps anyway. (Word count: ~1180)
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