The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education
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Anonymous
Explain instead of a “lol” like a teenager. Use your words. Explain why you think a pencil and book are superior? |
Anonymous
I agree 100%. It’s social media on iPhones and iPads for hours after school that’s the problem. Instead of checking out a kindergarten class check out the graduating class and where they’re going. |
Anonymous
DP. If you don't have screens at home, your kids will be at a HUGE advantage starting school and throughout their years in school. Get them into activities that are incompatible with sitting around and scrolling on a screen all day and keep encouraging it even if it means they change interests frequently until they find something that really clicks. Sports, music, theater, martial arts, Lego, building stuff and helping with DIY as they get older, painting, fixing cars, literally anything that keeps them busy and preferably at least somewhat physically active. Keep them off phones until they're teens and off screens at home for as long as you can. Yes, it's more work in the short term but it pays off big time. |
Anonymous
Disagree. Schools are responsible for teaching and they aren’t doing an effective job with EdTech and screens. Scores are worse than ever in every grade. There aren’t enough hours in the day to send your kid to school for 8 hrs and then have to homeschool them as well. But cutting back screen time at home would be helpful as well. But I do think schools are failing children miserably |
Anonymous
| Screen time in school is a problem. Screen time outside school also is a problem. |
Anonymous
| My mcps elementary kids are saying they are not using Chromebooks at school this year except for testing. In past years they were not using it as part of the curriculum but were allowed to use it sometimes. For example, the last 30 my minutes of the day. |
Anonymous
No appropriate in a school |
Anonymous
I agree, but I'm guessing the teachers need some time for grading or other things, which I can understand. I haven't heard of screen use in our school as it is being described in this thread. Kids are not learning to read on Chromebooks. |
Anonymous
| I think the education responsibility falls more on teachers in middle school and high school, but learning how to read is the parents responsibility. It's the parents job to get the kids to a point where they can learn. Then the schools can teach topics like mathematics and the sciences. Elementary school education is really the parents responsibility. |
Anonymous
My kid definitely played games on the Chromebook in kindergarten under the guise of literacy. |
Anonymous
That's ridiculous. I'm a child of educated immigrants who spoke limited English. They did not teach me to read. School did. Most kids do not learn just by being read to. They need explicit instruction in reading by someone trained to deliver it. |
Anonymous
I am all for improving working conditions for teachers, but this notion that it's understandable for teachers to stick kids on screens so they can get other things done is appalling. No, that's not okay. |
Anonymous
I'm on your side here but teachers were using screens for this purpose when I was a kid in the 90s. Endless episodes of Bill Nye, Magic School Bus etc. for no reason other than to get a moment of peace. I remember watching a Disney movie every Friday! |
Anonymous
Kids can watch porn in school on internet connected devices. I would much rather they wheel in a TV and show a movie. |
Anonymous
DP but one reason I think books and pencil and paper are superior is that studies have shown that the physical act of writing things down longhand helps commit them to memory. This makes sense to me, as I've long used longhand note taking to help synthesize information, even though I obviously used computers in all kinds of useful ways. Typing notes and information out on a computer could also help students commit the information to memory, in not quite as well, but that's largely not what EdTech has students doing. It mostly has them answering multiple choice questions via a touch screen in an app. This is the worst possible situation because even when the student learns material this way, they are not engaging with it in any way other than reading it on the screen. This is especially bad for things like vocabulary and foundational math (or any math), where it's very important for students to internalize the material so they can build off of it in the future. Earlier tonight, my DC asked me what the word "fester" meant. I asked her in what context, since it can have both literal and figurative meanings. She went and grabbed the book she had been reading that used the word, and was able to flip quickly to the page with the word because she remember the the physical location of the word on the page, in addition to remembering the part of the story it was in. She read the sentence to me and then we talked about what it meant in that context and also how else it can be used. The next best thing for her to do would be to physically write a sentence or some notes about the word, in the margins of the book or in a notebook. This is how deep linguist knowledge is built. Compare this to how a student might engage with that word in a reading comprehension app. They will read the passage on the screen containing the word. Later they will be asked to select one of several meanings for the word from a multiple choice list, and the app will provide the sentence where the word was used in the question (since there is not a good way for the student to page back through the app to find it themselves). Many students will answer the question correctly using context cues. Others may get it wrong and the app will let them know what the correct answer is. But this experience is not deeply engaging and a relatively smart student could complete the exercise correctly without ever really understanding the word, and is unlikely to pull it up from memory later. That is the difference between EdTech and using books and pencils and paper. One checks a box and the other actually engaged students with the material. One is better than the other, and it's very obvious which one that is. |