Why I’m Not a Fan of All the Technology in My Kid’s Classroom (And What I’ve Started Doing About It)
The first time I really felt it was at a parent-teacher conference in October. My daughter’s teacher, Ms. Alvarez, had her laptop open, and she was showing me a dashboard full of colored bars and percentages — reading fluency, math fact fluency, time on task. She clicked on a drop-down menu and pointed to a line graph that had apparently risen steadily since September. “See?” she said. “She’s showing really strong growth.”
I nodded along, but I kept staring at the little timer icon next to my daughter’s name. 47 minutes of daily usage on the literacy app. And separately, 23 minutes on the math program. And then there was the “independent reading” tab, which presumably meant the iPad was timing how many minutes she spent on digital books instead of paper ones.
I didn’t say anything mean. I like Ms. Alvarez. She’s doing her job, and honestly, the technology isn’t her idea. It’s the district’s, and the principal’s, and maybe the state’s. But I drove home that afternoon feeling like I’d just watched a report on my own child that had nothing to do with my child.
I know I’m not alone in this. There’s a quiet, almost guilty feeling among a lot of parents I talk to — the ones who’ll admit to each other in the pickup line that they’re just not that thrilled about the tablets and the chromebooks and the apps that seem to multiply every year. We’re not Luddites. Nobody wants to go back to ditto sheets and overhead projectors. But every time I walk into that classroom, I see something slightly different from the school I remember, and I’m not sure it’s better.
Here’s what I mean. My daughter is in third grade. Last year, she came home with a packet of math worksheets once a week. Now, she does everything on a screen. The app gives her a problem, she taps the answer, it tells her right or wrong, and then it gives her a new problem. There are little rewards — digital badges, confetti animations, a streak counter. She loves it, which is part of the problem. She’s not loving math; she’s loving the game. When I ask her about subtraction with regrouping, she can explain the app’s characters but not always the process. She knows if she answers quickly, she gets more “stars.” So she guesses fast. The app rewards speed over thinking.
I’ve started sitting with her when she does her twenty minutes of homework on the tablet. Not to hover, but because I want to see what she’s actually doing. And I’ve noticed that when she gets a question wrong, the app doesn’t really explain why. It just shows the correct answer, then throws a similar problem at her. If she gets it right, it moves on. If she gets it wrong again, it gives her an easier problem. There’s no moment where she sits back and goes, “Oh, I see what I did wrong.” There’s no frustration, but there’s no understanding either. It’s just this smooth, frictionless motion of tapping and moving forward.
And I think friction matters. I’m not saying kids need to suffer. But there’s a difference between struggling productively and just having to click through something quickly to get to the next shiny thing.
A few weeks ago, I brought this up at a school board meeting. I tried to say it carefully, because I didn’t want to come across as another angry parent who thinks screens are rotting everyone’s brains. I just said that I’d noticed a lot of screen time, and I wondered if there was any research that actually supported all these apps. The superintendent nodded and said, “We’re preparing kids for a digital future.” Which is a phrase people say when they don’t want to talk about whether it’s working.
Here’s the thing though — I’m not an expert. I’m a parent who’s been reading about this stuff, and I’ve found some studies that show modest gains from certain adaptive learning programs, but also a lot of studies that show diminishing returns after about twenty minutes. I’ve also read that the evidence for educational apps is mostly funded by the companies that sell them. That doesn’t mean they’re all bad, but it does mean I should be skeptical.
So what have I actually done? Not a revolution. Just some small, stubborn things.
First, I talked to the teacher — not to complain, but to ask a practical question. I said, “Could my daughter do the math app during class time instead of at home?” Ms. Alvarez was fine with it. She said the app was mostly for practice, and if I wanted to supplement with paper worksheets, that was okay too. I bought a cheap workbook at Target, and every night my daughter does three problems in it by hand. She complains a little, but I’ve noticed she actually thinks longer. She’s allowed to make mistakes and cross them out. There’s no timer. She’s slower, but she’s thinking.
I also made a rule about the reading app. The school uses one that tracks minutes and gives quizzes. My daughter was spending time on the app but not really reading — she was flipping through pages and answering basic questions to rack up minutes. So I told her she can use the app for twenty minutes, but after that she has to read a paper book. Just a fun one. Not an assigned one. I found a box of old paperbacks at a garage sale, and she’s been working through The Boxcar Children. She reads them in bed, sometimes with a flashlight under the covers, which honestly made me want to cry with happiness.
I know this doesn’t solve the bigger issue. The school district isn’t going to roll back its tech initiative because I bought a workbook. And I’m not going to pretend I’m some expert on digital pedagogy. But I think there’s something to be said for being the kind of parent who doesn’t just accept everything that comes home in a backpack.
Here’s what I’ve learned so far. You have to ask specific questions. Don’t just say “I don’t like the screens.” Ask: “What exactly is the app teaching that a pencil and paper can’t?” Ask: “How much of the class period is spent looking at a screen versus talking to a classmate?” Ask what happens when the wifi goes down. The answer to that last one is almost always revealing — if the whole lesson collapses without internet, then the tech isn’t enhancing learning; it’s replacing it.
There are also some practical things I wish I’d known earlier. For example, you can request a paper version of the homework. Most districts have to provide an alternative if you ask. And you can set limits on the device itself — the screen time settings will block certain apps after a certain hour. That sounds obvious, but I didn’t realize I could set it specifically for the school apps. Now the tablet shuts down math and reading apps at 7:30, which gives my daughter a hard stop. She knows she can’t argue with me because it’s the machine that says no, and oddly, she accepts that better than me saying no.
I’ve also become friendly with the school librarian. She’s quietly against a lot of this, and she’s been slipping me extra books from the library sale cart. When I told her what I was doing at home, she just said, “You’re not the only one.” There are other parents who feel the same way. We’re not organized or loud about it. We’re just out here doing old-school homework with our kids at the kitchen table, trying to balance out what the district has decided is necessary.
Last night, my daughter was doing one of her Target workbook problems — a word problem about sharing marbles. She got it wrong at first, but she didn’t want to quit. She sat there, erasing and rewriting, getting frustrated, and finally something clicked. She raised her fist and said, “Oh, I missed the word ‘twice.’” She wasn’t celebrating a digital badge. She was celebrating the moment she caught her own mistake. That’s a feeling an app can’t really give you — it just moves on to the next question.
I’m not saying all classroom technology is bad. Some of it is genuinely useful. My daughter’s class uses a voice recording app for practicing reading aloud, and that’s actually pretty smart because she can hear herself and notice where she stumbles. I can get behind that. Different tools have different purposes. The thing I have a problem with is when technology becomes the default for everything, not because it works better but because it’s easier to manage. A tablet is easier than a classroom set of books. An app is easier than grading papers. A dashboard is easier than a conversation. But easier isn’t the same as better.
I still don’t love it. I’m probably going to be the parent at every conference who asks the awkward questions about screen time and whether the app is really necessary. I’ve made my peace with that. But at least I’ve figured out that I have more power than I thought I did. Not to change the school, but to change what happens in my own house. To offer my daughter a pencil and a blank piece of paper and a problem that takes longer than two taps to solve. To let her read books that don’t track how many minutes she spends on them.
I don’t know if this will matter in the long run. Maybe by middle school she’ll be totally digital, and these small moments won’t mean much. But I think they will. Because the habit of slowing down, of sitting with a hard problem, of reading a book because it’s good and not because it logs a badge — that stuff sticks. It’s not flashy. It doesn’t show up on a dashboard. But it’s real learning to me. And I’ll keep finding ways to make room for it, even if it means being the weird parent who asks for a worksheet once in a while.
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