On school days at 2 p.m., Nicole Dobbins walks into her home office in Alpharetta, Ga., logs on to ParentConnect, and reads updated reports on her three children. Then she rushes up the block to meet the fourth and sixth graders’ buses.
But in the thump and tumble of backpacks and the gobbling of snacks, Mrs. Dobbins refrains from the traditional after-school interrogation: Did you cut math class? What did you get on your language arts test?
Thanks to ParentConnect, she already knows the answers. And her children know she knows. So she cuts to the chase: “Tell me about this grade,” she will say.
When her ninth grader gets home at 6 p.m., there may well be ParentConnect printouts on his bedroom desk with poor grades highlighted in yellow by his mother. She will expect an explanation. He will be braced for a punishment.
“He knows I’m going to look at ParentConnect every day and we will address it,” Mrs. Dobbins said.
Like many technology “solutions,” this has both a good side and a bad side. As a teacher, I find these grading systems troubling because there is no chance for teachers and students to negotiate grade changes, extra credit, etc. before parents are brought into the conversation. Also, it adds to the pressure on teachers to grade and post scores quickly, leading to more “bubble tests” and fewer subjective assessments that take longer to grade and require students to be more thoughtful in their answers. I think a compromise of bi-weekly grade reports mailed to teachers makes far more sense than daily access to what is always a “work in process.”
My son has for two years had a maths site that is regularly set for homework. He doesn’t mind (possibly because he is good at maths) but some of his peers are very unhappy because the teacher can tell exactly who hasn’t done their homework!
What they are expected to do is log on under their password, and then they are automatically presented with the questions that the teacher has preset — and these are marked automatically by the site and a report sent to the teacher (not the parents) on how each child has done and in particular whether there were any systematic errors being made by a student.
I think the approach has been productive because it is not used as the main teaching point — but as I say is set as homework consolidation of what has been taught in class — and the teacher follows up positively with extra tuition for those students who did not do well in the homework — so it is seen as a screening tool to highlight who needs extra teaching and in what areas, not as a report to either the teacher or the parents that will lead to punishment.
But this system is not set for math, which is a right or wrong matter. It is set to force students to perform 24 hours a day, to allow themselves to be driven by their parents expectations regardless of their own competencies and desires. This is not about education, it is about social coercion, about a driven society from which there is no hiding or escaping. In short, this is the Nanny Society again, always prying, always bullying, always manipulating, always power hungry, and it is the mothers, not the fathers, who are fueling this obsessive, compulsive society. Is this good for education? Or is it its death? I tell you, education means more than just getting the test right, it is about developing what Barzun called “the well-furnished mind” without which sound ethical judgments can never be made, and without these, our culture is damned in every sense of the word, damned to be a consumer-obsessed, success-obsessed, technology-obsessed ethos with the attention span of a two year old and the hunger of robots for lubricant. Larry
I agree with Larry 100%.
Jon so do I.
I had a mom that would watch me do my homework. She would not do it for me. Sociology, Crafts, etc. were not required to graduate grade school. But Math, Science, and various other core subjects were. Fortunately my mom refused to go to work until my sister and I were old enough to take care of ourselves. And woe to any teacher who intimated that we were not learning anything. She visited more than one teacher when she was curious to know why we were having difficulty [.. this included the principal as well.] One of the first questions my mother asked when we got home in the afternoon was what were our school assignments for the evening. (we couldn’t get away with anthing)