... Srsly?!

[ladynisa.livejournal.com]

I support graphing tablets, response clickers, and interactive whiteboards for both K-12 schools and Universities and am in the position of having direct contact with the end user (something that I haven't had to do in over a year). What have I learned? That I'm going to be very, very afraid to put my kid(s) in public school. Srsly. When a TEACHER can't follow step by step instructions (much like how they would give their students) that they both have written down in front of them AND are being repeated to the verbally, what chance in the WORLD do those poor kids have at actually LEARNING anything?!

Comments

[greatblondino.livejournal.com]

Urgh, I feel your pain. I used to work as a techie in a school, and the 80-odd teachers created WAY more of a mess than the 1,500 students. The students fixed their own problems (and sometimes the teachers'), the challenge there was in keeping 1,500 potential hackers out of places they shouldn't be :)

Most teachers did predictable things like write in marker pen on a £2,000 digital whiteboard, or leave laptop cables at home thinking the battery lasted 'a week or so, like my mobile phone?'. There was one department that consistently excelled in stupidity, though, with almost every virus infection or physically damaged laptop belonging to that team. Coffee in keyboards, broken CD trays, broken LCDs... Yep, it was Phys. Ed. I can just imagine frequent shouts of 'ON YOUR HEAD!' when one chucks a basketball across the office, narrowly missing a colleague and instead landing on his notebook PC. Quite what PE teachers need technology for I never understood.

Oh, and there was the core network switch that was hanging from a Victorian-era ventilation grille by means of two treasury tags that had been wedged into the holes on the back so the fans couldn't spin...

[ladynisa.livejournal.com]

I'll have you know, my face LITERALLY twitched in pain when you mentioned writing in marker on the digital whiteboards. Those things are WAY too expensive to begin with...

But seriously, WTF is wrong with that Phys Ed group??? Whya re you letting either students OR other teachers CHUCK basketballs around your equipment???

[greatblondino.livejournal.com]

Iunno... Small, self-contained office full of technology, sporting equipment, hot drinks and steroid-fuelled meatheads? What could possibly go wrong? Like the computer from the TV series Red Dwarf, 'I have an IQ of approximately 5,000, which is the same as 5,000 PE teachers, or 10,000 parking attendants'. Not that I'm one to punt a stereotype, but a PE teacher was recently killed in my city when he got drunk and climbed into a giant wheelie bin to go to sleep, only to be crushed by the recycling truck the next morning.

I don't work in the school now, though! I've since replaced those students and teachers with police officers, who bring with them an entirely new set of challenges and facepalms :P

[theogrin.livejournal.com]

Used to be a student at a charter school here, for a brief period... wherein a few friends and I were effectively the equivalent of the school's IT department. One of the most 'enjoyable' activities there was wiping Nimda from the entire...fucking...network, and I was requested repeatedly to assist in removing virus after virus from the principal's machine, as well as setting up printers, et cetera...

Teachers who can't figure out how to use computers without breaking them should go back to memos, post-its, and a filing cabinet. Just... oi.

[sdaemon.livejournal.com]

enh, I had a good public school experience. Maybe I'm the exception to the norm, but...not all public school teachers are dumber than bags of hammers.