Why I Finally Started Questioning Classroom Technology (And What I Do Now)
It started at a back-to-school night last fall. My daughter’s fifth-grade teacher stood in front of a projector and gave the same polished presentation I’d heard for years. “Every student has a Chromebook,” she said. “You’ll get a notification when they submit an assignment. You can check their progress in real time. It’s all right here on the parent portal.”
Around me, parents nodded. Some pulled out their phone to download the app. I nodded too, because that’s what you do at back-to-school night. But as she walked us through the dashboard — green checks, lesson completions, time spent on tasks — I felt a strange, quiet dread. None of it was about learning. It was about watching.
Later, I tried to explain it to my husband. “I feel like we’ve been converted without hearing a sermon,” I said. He laughed. But I wasn’t joking.
We’ve let educational technology move into our schools like weather. It’s not debated. It’s not voted on. It’s not even discussed in most parent forums. We have one-on-one Chromebooks in elementary classrooms. We have math apps replacing math worksheets. We have teachers who are required to assign reading on a screen because the district wants usage data. And we’ve become so used to it that the only question we seem to ask is whether the wi-fi is working.
That’s the thing that bothers me now, more than any single device. We’re not outraged. We’re not even mildly concerned. We’re just tired, and distracted, and grateful the school is “preparing them for the future.”
But the future arrived, and no one checked whether it was actually good for children.
The first time I really felt it was a Tuesday afternoon. My daughter came home from school, dropped her backpack by the door, and announced, “I did all my reading on iReady today.”
“Great,” I said. “What’d you read?”
She paused. “I don’t know. It was like, a passage. Then it asked me questions.”
“What was the passage about?”
She shrugged. “I don’t remember. It was on the screen.”
That was it. She had spent forty minutes reading something, and she could not tell me a single detail about it. I don’t blame her. The reading program is designed to teach skill mastery, not meaning. There are progress bars, minute counters, and reward animations. The actual story is just an obstacle between her and the next level.
I thought about all the paper books she used to bring home from the school library. The dog-eared pages. The accidental cereal dust inside. The way she’d tell me about a character while stirring yogurt into her soup. Those books weren’t tracked. They didn’t generate data. But they made her a reader.
Now she reads on a screen, and the screen reports to administrators, and I’m supposed to feel comforted by that. But I keep thinking about what she doesn’t have: the quiet space to wonder, the physical weight of a book, the chance to get bored in the middle of a chapter and then come back to it.
I shouldn’t pretend our family is blameless. We do screen time at home. We’ve used a tablet at a restaurant on a bad day. I’m not anti-technology, and I’m not saying every classroom should throw out the Chromebooks. But there’s a difference between using a tool and being shaped by it. And schools are being shaped by tech companies — not by educators, not by parents, not by children’s actual needs.
One teacher friend of mine told me she wanted to assign handwritten essays this year. She was told the school could not support it. Not because handwriting is bad, but because the writing platform had already been purchased, and teachers needed to use it so the district could measure “growth.”
“But we already know what growth looks like,” she said. “It looks like a kid reading and writing and thinking. Nobody needs a dashboard to see that.”
I asked if she could do both. “Tell the kids to write in a notebook first, then type it into the platform,” she said. She is doing that now, quietly breaking the rules. “It slows them down,” she told me. “They have to think before buttons start lighting up.”
I’ve started doing something similar with my son, who is in seventh grade. He gets homework on his Chromebook every night. I used to just let him plug in and submit. Now I ask one simple thing: show me what you actually learned.
If he has to use Khan Academy or IXL, I ask him to pick one problem and explain it back to me. If he can’t, I don’t say “go redo it.” I say, “The app doesn’t count as learning if you don’t remember it twenty minutes later. Let’s figure out what it’s actually asking.”
It sounds small, but it changes the relationship. He’s not just completing a task for a computer. He’s accountable to a person who can ask why.
There’s also the privacy problem, which no one talks about because it’s not as visible as a classroom full of screens. Every time a student logs into a learning app, data goes somewhere. Reading time. response time. number of attempts. even a little biometric data from how they move the mouse. Some of that is blended and sold or used to build marketing profiles. Parents don’t know because we weren’t given a choice. The school adopted the app, and we adopted the terms, because that’s what it said on the paper we signed at registration.
I’m not going to pretend I have a clean answer. I don’t. Our district still uses the Chromebooks. My daughter still does iReady. My son still submits typed essays. This isn’t a story where I pull my kids out of school and start a homestead in Vermont.
But I’ve started asking questions at conferences. Instead of “How is my child doing in math?” I ask, “What does my child do when they get stuck on a paper problem? Do they have a choice to write by hand sometimes? Who can see the data from this app? Is their reading scored by a human or a program?”
Some teachers welcome these questions. Some stiffen. One looked at me like I had asked to speak to the principal. I don’t care anymore. We have to push back with the one thing parents aren’t using nearly enough: our ordinary attention.
We are the only ones who can notice when something quietly disappears. When my daughter used to tell me about her day, she’d describe art projects, messy science experiments, a book she read under her desk. Lately, she tells me what level she reached on her app. Those are not the same thing. And I don’t want her to grow up thinking that a progress bar is the same as leaning.
I’m not sure what the right balance is yet. Maybe no one is. But I know we have to stop nodding along when school leaders say “personalized learning” while staring at a spreadsheet. We have to ask what is actually being personalized, and what is being lost while the screen glows.
Right now, our house has a small shelf by the back door where we keep library books. My seventh grader still grumbles when I ask him to draft a paragraph on notebook paper before typing it. My daughter still asks for a screen at night, and we still say yes sometimes.
But on the days when she comes home and can’t tell me what she read on iReady, I turn off the screens early, we sit on the couch, and I read aloud from an old library book. It isn’t a grand rebellion. It doesn’t change the education policy. But it keeps one small thing alive: the idea that learning grows best in bodies, minds, and living rooms — not in databases.
I wish we were all a little more angry about that. Then maybe we could start doing something about it, one question at a time.
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