The Ed-Tech Fight No One’s Winning Right Now
I left parent-teacher conferences last Tuesday with a crumpled petition tucked in my lesson plan book, coffee stain and all, from Mrs. Henderson, mom of my 7th grader Jax. She’s one of the 120 parents that signed the district-wide petition to ban all ed-tech from kindergarten through 8th grade—no smart boards, no math apps, no chromebooks for daily work, nothing. I get where she’s coming from, honestly. She pulled out her phone mid-conference to show me a screenshot of Jax’s iReady notifications blowing up his lock screen at 9 p.m. on a school night, said he’s been complaining of headaches three times a week since we started using the app this year, and she’s positive half the time he’s just flipping to a hidden tab to play Roblox instead of doing fractions. She’s not the only one. Last month a mom pulled me aside in the grocery store parking lot to rant that the reading app her 4th grader uses served her kid an ad for a violent first-person shooter game. Half the parents I talk to are already one screen-time fight away from losing it at dinner every night—why should school add more fuel to that fire?
I get it. I’m a parent too, my oldest is 8, I’ve hidden the iPad from him more than once when I’ve seen him zone out for an hour just scrolling short videos. I don’t think these parents are being unreasonable Luddites or anything, like some of my colleagues are saying in the staff group chat. That’s the thing that’s bugging me most about this whole fight—everyone’s picked a side and no one’s talking about the messy in-between.
Then last week we had a whole staff meeting to respond to the petition, and yeah, almost every teacher I work with says banning all ed-tech is an insane idea. And they’re not wrong, either. Let’s go back to Jax. Jax has dyscalculia, he can’t make sense of printed word problems to save his life. Before we had the math app we use now, he’d sit in the back of my class every day, hood up, not even trying, because he couldn’t parse the words on the page fast enough to get to the math part. The app reads every problem out loud to him, adjusts the difficulty so he doesn’t get hit with three super hard problems in a row and give up. Last quarter he went from failing to a C minus. That’s the biggest win he’s had in math since third grade. If we take the app away, he goes right back to failing. That’s not nothing.
Or Mia, who missed two weeks of school last month with mono, right? Before ed-tech, if you missed two weeks, you got a stack of worksheets when you came back, you were so far behind you might as well just start the unit over next semester. Now she can watch recordings of my lectures at 2 in the afternoon when she’s awake enough, rewind the parts she doesn’t get, do the work at her own pace. She didn’t fall behind at all. And don’t get me started on grading. I have 120 students. If I have to grade every single exit ticket, every single practice worksheet by hand, that’s an extra two hours of work every single night. I already leave the house at 7 a.m. and get home at 6 p.m. I don’t have two extra hours. Most of my colleagues don’t. We’re already stretched so thin we’re cracking. Banning ed-tech isn’t going to bring back some golden age of teaching, it’s just going to push more of us to quit.
I even heard Mr. G, the 30-year veteran who keeps complaining about “kids these days and their screens” go on about it at the staff meeting. He ranted for 10 minutes about how when he taught with just chalk and textbooks it was better, but after the meeting I passed by his classroom and saw him pulling up his attendance on the ed-tech gradebook and emailing a parent, same as the rest of us. No one’s actually going cold turkey here.
And yeah, I’ve had my own moments where I wanted to throw the whole smart board out the second floor window. Last week it froze mid-lesson on slope, I stood there clicking the stupid screen for eight whole minutes while the wifi cut in and out, the kids started throwing erasers at each other, I ended up just giving them a study hall and going to sit in the teacher’s lounge to drink bad coffee for 10 minutes. I complained about it for two days. It’s garbage half the time. It’s buggy, it’s overpriced, the companies update it every six months so you have to re-learn how to use it all over again. I don’t love it. I don’t think most teachers love it. It’s just a tool.
But the parents who want it banned aren’t just mad about screens, right? They’re mad that they’re burnt out. They’re working two jobs, they don’t have time to sit with their kid while they do 30 minutes of iReady every night, they just see their kid staring at a screen and they worry they’re losing actual human interaction in school. That fear is real. And the teachers who say it’s insane to ban it? We’re scared too. We’re scared we’re gonna get even more work, we’re scared we’re gonna let the kids who need this tool the most down.
I don’t have some neat answer here. The school board’s gonna vote on it next month, and I have no idea which way it’s gonna go. After my conference with Mrs. Henderson, I walked Jax back to class, and he pulled me aside by the water fountain, quiet so his mom couldn’t hear, and he said “If they ban it, does that mean I have to do all my work out of the big textbook now?” I didn’t know what to say. I just patted his shoulder and said we’d figure it out.
Last night I saw that the parent petition group shared a meme of a chromebook being tossed into a dumpster, got 140 likes. My teacher union group shared an article saying banning ed-tech will set our kids back five years in learning outcomes. No one’s talking about how most days I use the smart board for five minutes to pull up a warm-up, then we do the rest of the lesson on whiteboards, talking, working in groups. No one’s asking the kids what they think, mostly. It’s just two sides yelling past each other. I don’t know what’s gonna happen. I just know whoever wins, the kids are the ones who’ll end up picking up the pieces. (Word count: 1182)
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