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I wrote a while back about technology in the classroom. This obsession with technology at school is present even in homework, I am finding, and this parent isn’t happy about it.
I remember back in the day – when I was in school – we actually took typing classes. We learned the correct finger positions, and we did typing drills to build our speed and accuracy. That was in high school.
Today, elementary school students are expected to type reports. The problem is, there are no typing classes given in school anymore – not in high school, and certainly not in elementary school. I guess that the powers that be just assume that every kid is a proficient typist because every kid has a computer at home that they’ve been using since they were babies. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Some families cannot afford a computer – yes, in this day and age. Some families, like ours, do have a computer, but have not been allowing their children to be on it since babyhood. Also, the fine motor skills required for proficient typing is often absent in young kids, so what you end up seeing a lot of is hunting and pecking. A single paragraph might take an agonizing hour to type for a little kid. Which means, of course, that Mom or Dad often ends up typing Junior’s papers for him. Which is counterproductive on numerous fronts.
My fourth-grade twins were recently given an assignment whereby they each had to research a certain aspect of California missions and type a short paper about their findings – just a paragraph or two. The teacher then wanted their work products emailed to him. We bought a MacBook for the kids this year, specifically for them to use for school work, because frankly, I was getting tired of sharing my laptop with them all the time. (I am very aware of how fortunate we are to be able to own more than one computer, when some families cannot afford any.) In order to save costs, however, we only installed Pages on the kids’ laptop to use for word processing.
So the girls hunted and pecked their way through each of their mission papers. As neither of them have email accounts at nine years old, I attempted to email their papers to their teacher to no avail. I tried multiple times, and the attachments failed every time. I printed the girls’ papers and told them to just turn in the hard copies. they were told by their teacher that he required them to be emailed to him, and that if they were not emailed to him, they would receive zeros on the assignment. I confess this is what my daughters said; did their teacher really say that? I don’t know. If he did, I think that’s pretty appalling. I then put the documents on a thumb drive and attempted to open them in Word from my laptop. No go.
By now I was fuming. Why weren’t the hard copies enough? Why was their assignment creating so much work for me?
In the end, I retyped both papers in Word on my laptop and emailed them to the girls’ teacher. And not with a smile, either.
Kids need to be taught how to type in school, and there needs to be much less of a reliance on and requirement for the use of technology for homework.
Hometown Homework Chronicles 
I, speaking as a traditionally trained typist (Freshman year, high school) concur with you 100%. I have been frustrated with various typing assignments that my fourth grader has been assigned this year. Her teacher, who I like very much, informed me that “with some extra practice on the typing practice website” my daughter should be able to type her own papers in about a month.
Yeah. Sorry. That’s the dumbest thing i ever heard. What ends up happening is that my daughter now writes less than before so that she won’t have to painstakingly type it all in later. Great! Just what I wanted as she develops her writing skills!
“They’ll have to be typing papers in college” someone said to me once. Yes. And she’ll be driving a car in 7 years. Should we put her behind the wheel now too?
Oh my gosh – I despise that “they’ll have to do it later, so they better get used to it now” philosophy! It’s ridiculous. Why not let later take care of itself? Our elementary school has decided that sixth graders should do “rotations” every day, meaning that every day they rotate among teachers and classrooms. It seems ridiculously time wasting to me, and all in the name of “preparing” them for junior high next year. Why do kids suddenly need to be prepared for it? They’ll be ready when they get there because they’ll be developmentally more mature than they are now!
Since I teach online, I have students who cannot afford to buy Word for their computers. So I hunted online to find them all a free program similar to Word that I could open and read in order to grade. I found “Open Office” which is nearly identical to Microsoft Office Word and they also have a program (free!) similar to PowerPoint, which again I can open and read on my laptop. It can be used on Mac too. Here is the link in case you’re interested: http://www.openoffice.org/download/
I guess I don’t understand the point of having kids in elementary school type their work if they aren’t taught how to type. Another aspect of learning to type is learning good grammar skills too so I would assume that their typed products aren’t all that great either since they are hunting and pecking. I had high school students who still hunted and pecked even after taking a typing class. It’s odd how we have so much more technology than when you and I were kids, but yet our kids seem to know less about it then ever before.
Totally agree, Stephanie! I’m going to check out that program, too – thanks!
Open Office is a good one that I use myself on my Mac. I don’t have Word at all. You just have to make sure you choose .doc as the format you want to save it in so others can open it.
In regards to your post, Lisa, I find all these unsupported mandates outrageous. It is very true where I live in rural upstate NY that many cannot afford computer. Many do not have internet or email. This assignment is an unrealistic expectation unless they intend to prepare the students to accomplish it on their own. I, as a parent, would be outraged as well if the work that supposedly is intended to benefit my child, fell on me.
I just heard at my local school that in order to save money they are supplying children with a link where they can go and print out their own worksheets for homework at home. Again, what about the families that don’t have reliable internet or any internet at all, much less a decent computer WITH a working printer.
Yes, fuming too right now.
I think this is absolutely ridiculous as well. I will say, in Pages, you have to export the document as a .doc file in order for someone with Word to open it. “File”, “export”, choose “Word .doc”
Thanks, Sheila!
The 3rd through 5th graders at our school have the opportunity to use a typing tutorial, but only if they finish their work ahead of schedule, don’t have music lessons that day, haven’t lost a privilege for naughty behavior, etc. Needless to say, my daughter has never done it. She had one project last year that needed to be typed, and there are two this year. I have her write everything out by hand, do all the editing, get it perfect and ready to go, and then she reads it to me while I simply transcribe it in Word. Her teacher last year said he wanted them typed both to encourage kids to use the typing tutorial, and also, because it was a 3-pages-typed report, he just didn’t want to try to read that many (9 or 10 handwritten? times 24 kids in class) pages of kid handwriting.
This is against the law, the teacher can’t only accept assignments electronically unless the school is going to provide all of the electronics. He can prefer electronically submitted work, but his actions were discriminatory to those without the means.
I agree. I have to say, however, that this is only what my daughter told me – I did not double check with the teacher to verify that he would only accept the work electronically. But you’re right, if it actually was the case, that would absolutely be discriminatory.
I do know that there are teachers at my kids’ school who insist that kids check their class websites when they are out of school due to illness in order to keep up with assignments. This, too, is discriminatory against students who do not have access to internet. It’s also ludicrous that young children are expected to keep up with assignments even when they are ill.