The middle schooler had been begging to opt out, citing headaches from the Chromebook screen and a dislike of the AI chatbot recently integrated into it.
Parents across the country are taking steps to stop their children from using school-issued Chromebooks and iPads, citing concerns about distractions and access to inappropriate content that they fear hampers their kids’ education.
Unfortunately even this will have to be another battle because there is a lot of monied interest in shoving all these shitty devices down schools throats.
If something is clearly doing harm but no one is stopping it, then it’s because someone is making money off of it.
This may be the millennial in me talking but I’ve generally found schools to be fucking dire when it comes to implementing technology in the classroom.
During Year 10 (equivalent to 9th Grade for any Yanks here), our school enrolled in a government programme to start using PDAs in the classroom. So they offered every kid in our year a Pocket LOOX 720 at a heavily subsidized price.
They were never used in lessons.
Pupils instead used them as music/video playback devices and to play games, since it was 2007, smartphones weren’t yet a thing and YouTube was just in its infancy.
Maybe things have improved since I left secondary school.
Not better at all, current trend is to buy whatever services microsoft or google offers.
It’s also a BIG privacy issue.
Every one of these parents uses technology in their work, I’m betting. They’re seeing their kids up to be under prepared for the future. These are probably the same parents who complain that they don’t teach cursive in schools anymore.
Are Chromebooks screens that bad?
Teacher here: In my classroom I’m purposely moving towards pen and paper. Each middle schooler has a Chromebook and it has wrecked their brains (along with social media and phones that they are on outside of school.) You leave them to do an assignment and they will be on a game in 10 seconds unless you keep on them. Tech needs to be used, but right now it is killing any curiosity and stamina for learning that they have left.
You leave them to do an assignment and they will be on a game in 10 seconds unless you keep on them.
Why even have games in them? If I am an entrepreneur, a school notepad or laptop without games is a good business idea…
School Chromebooks don’t come with games, except for the “No Internet Game” which is baked into Chrome. The games being used are web games. Schools have blocking agents, but the websites mutate faster than the blocking software. (Looking at you .io domains)
My school eventually deployed software that only allows students on teacher approved sites, a “block all BUT…” rule and the little devils learned that if they opened more than 50 tabs that agent stopped filtering. I’ve also had students buy an identical Chromebook to their school issued one and use a hotspot to bypass all detection and filtering.
The internet is full of games
Maybe they’re just sick of staring at screens, and the Chromebook screen was the thing they hated the most because of the activities associated with it. Plus if you’re using it for most school work, a kid would be likely to be staring at that longer than their phone or other devices at home.
Maybe, way worse than their screens though, is the fact that they run
chromeBootlickerOS.
It’s happening.
Can’t wait until it happens at work.
Oh wait, it’s not, and this is dumb?
Public education either needs to be reclaimed and rebuilt from all the corrupting influences that have torn it apart. I’m not worried about the children of intelligent people, who can fall back on enrichment provided by their families, but so many kids are, at best, getting left behind or worse, being indoctrinated with all sorts of corpo-fascism now inherent in the system. Most kids seem to be coping pretty alright, so far, but I worry about the trends, and the future.
First off, congratulations on posting the comment you were working on instead of deciding you didn’t care enough to hit send. Second, I’ve done exactly what you’ve done, so if I’m a pedant I’m also a hypocrite. Third, I’m really really curious; what was the “or” half of the either/or statement you started at the beginning of your post? Or did autocorrect change really to either? Inquiring minds want to know
We all need to do this. I’d be raising hell if my kid were in school these days. He graduated in 2016, just before things got REALLY bad.
I read /r/teachers, and I’m shocked that kids are being passed up through the grades who can barely read, and can’t focus on anything at all for more than one minute. They’re allowed to eat in class? Look at their phones? They get up and wander around, and even leave the classroom? WTF?
“Sit down! Shut up! Put the damn phone away and pay attention!”, is what I’d say right before I was fired from being a teacher, I suppose.
They’re putting AI in children’s school laptops? Not only teaching them to think less, but letting a corporation directly influence them?
Its working exactly as intended.
They are Chromebooks. A gigantic corporation is already influencing them?
There’s a big difference between “hey kids, use this machine, it has Internet access and Brand products” and “hey kids, ask me anything you’d like, and I’ll give you the Brand approved answer.”
Kids have two options. Out dated propaganda, or propaganda that might hallucinate a few key details.
Well obviously the propaganda I grew up with is better and clearly didn’t affect me at all…
said she was only allowed under state law to opt the children out of standardized testing and sexual health lessons,
WTF? Why the fuck can someone opt kids out of EITHER of these things?
There’s an argument to be made against standardized testing. Very neurodivergent individuals, for example, can suffer a lot under bad standardized tests. Idk, though, it would be better to just make a better system, rather than letting people opt out. As long as that’s not happening, there is, however, an argument against standardized tests.
Christians. They deserve special treatment, because they are all special.
Well the latter is pretty easy, it’s easier to sexually molest children that haven’t gone through sex education.
I think this heavily depends. Sex education for a lot of places, especially in rural areas, tends to be fucked up backwards and downright harmful. Last I checked several states have abstinence only sex ed and do things like show kids a bunch of pictures of STDs and leverage scare tatics to deter them from having sex. I think opting out of that shit show and having a candid conversation with your kid about sex is probably the ethical thing to do in those places.
I’ve opted out of the school Chromebooks for my kids because they have computers running real GNU at home. We should all be outraged that schools are pushing a locked-down surveillance/content consumption-only platform, as opposed to something like a Raspberry Pi that actually empowers kids to have real computer literacy.
real GNU at home
GNU/Hurd… or GNU/Linux?
I’ve recently taken to calling it GNU+Linux.
Who cares, as long as it’s copyleft?
Sounds great but I can guarantee no IT team wants to deal with this
This - like most problems we’ve created in the US - comes down to money. Google will often donate/grant Chromebooks to schools in order to create future
addictscustomers. It would cost schools a lot more to do what’s right (or at least better) for their students, so they don’t do that thing.yup, it’s the same playbook Apple had in the 80’s and 90’s. Get them into schools and get everyone used to their ecosystem so they would buy their products after graduating. Bill Gates did the same thing in the 90’s to outfit computer labs in schools with a bunch of Dell computers.
I’m curious to know if anyone here has ever approached the school IT department to ask what steps they take to mitigate or eliminate surveillance and tracking in these devices. I know it’s inherent in Google products to begin with, but do they even try? Or pretend to try? Or admit they don’t care?
I did! The IT department literally laughed at me. I also tried to get them to let teachers install uBlock Origin, because they apparently will watch educational YouTube videos in class sometimes, and then get random ads for everyone to suffer under. But uBlock Origin doesn’t have their support… Ironically, they only support Windows computers and iPhones on the school network. Android, MacOS, and Linux are all officially unsupported.
I’ve asked about this a few times and I was told by our administration that every company we work with signs a data privacy agreement stating that they will not sell or compromise any sensitive student data. But I was also told that our administration team doesn’t usually follow up with these companies to make sure they’re following the rules. Therefore it’s an unfortunate situation of, “above my pay grade.” Also, when opting out of a Chromebook, you’re only making sure your kid doesn’t go home with one. Most, if not all, teachers don’t shy away from Google Classroom…
The school IT department is often the math teacher’s side hustle or a badly paid gamer dude with Microsoft certifications.
Surveillance and tracking is the least of their concerns.
The IT Department knows about all the problems it’s the administration that does not care and won’t let the IT people do anything. Also, you don’t want to know how bad the procurement process is with most school systems.
Good point. I’ve never worked in education. I neglected the fact that they’re just fulfilling orders. I believe you it’s probably a shitshow with privacy and preemptive security procedures almost non-existent.
It’s sorta the opposite. It’s not that privacy and security are afterthoughts, it’s that oversight and monitoring are baked into everything. They lean into lockdown browsers, mandatory on cameras for assessments, and a whole bunch of anti-cheat tech. Privacy and security are on the mind, they just want none of it.
Worse than that though, it’s a carefully crafted economy where vendors knowingly supply incomplete and broken systems so that they have a continuous need to also sell professional services, training, and technical support. It’s just like textbooks and curricula; crooked AF because they know that nobody is paying attention, and the entire system operates with an expectation of profound inefficiency.
I don’t work for a school, but I apply default policies to stop tracking/telemetry on all the company computers. I wasn’t asked to, nor do my coworkers seem to care nearly as much. So the answer is probably that it will entirely depend on the IT admin they hired and how much they care
My first year teaching I was encouraged to do everything on the chromebooks, because the district wanted to save on printing costs.
If you have 100+ students, and are limited to 500 pages/month (I could print 500 more, but had to purchase my own paper…), you have to use the laptops.
Also, when parents and students increasingly treat attendance as a suggestion, keeping up with paper assignments is hellish. There were days I showed up with 1/3 or more of my class missing - with online class work, I at least could say “the work is available online.”
The technology is a problem, but it’s a problem that’s arisen because class sizes are out of control and admin has zero idea what is going on in the classroom. It’s a bandage that’s been left on so long the skin is starting to get infected around it.
I really don’t understand why teachers need to pay for all of this…
Here in Germany (admittedly not at the forefront of digitalization) we just got to borrow school-supplied books. There were some exercise books we had to buy ourselves and at the end of the year we had to pay some 15€ for printing.
In the last three years we were allowed to bring our own laptops and tablets, which would save us the printing costs.
Other teaching material costs were always paid for by the school.
What about this does not work in the US of A?
Not enough profit for the shareholders if the school is free. Also, how can they pay for the biggest military in the wolrd if they keep funding needless items like school lunches and resources.
What the fuck is it with schools being stingy with printed paper. At scale its less than a cent a sheet
So many donations and funds for schools are earmarked, you can only spend them in specific ways. If you spend them in ways that don’t align with the earmark, it’s incredibly easy for the donors or the state to claw them back. So that $40mil your local suburban school district spent on a new football stadium? That was likely earmarked SPECIFICALLY for football, they can’t really just swish the money to better textbooks, or whatever. Same with tech funding - you get $250k to upgrade your school district with Chromebooks or whatever, you MUST buy within what the funding packet tells you you can buy, and you can’t really do anything else with it.
That doesn’t even get into the cartelization of textbooks and school software. There’s so few real options that it’s incredibly easy for these companies to collude without really looking like it’s collusion.
They also have to be paying for the software that tracks how many prints you use. It’s fucking stupid, and it’s just one of a million little ways that they make sure to punish anyone stupid enough to teach.
I ended up buying my own printer. Printing alone got me to the maximum $300 of classroom expenses I was allowed to write off on taxes.
Unfortunately not only a problem in schools. Where I work at there’s already a pay per use system that bills the department, with an entire system with separate codes to identify where you belong financially. Now they’re debating adding a fee for the ability to print.
So you save 100 in taxes and pay 500 in printing costs… You’re down 400 for supplying your employer. Lol
They’re pretty obviously supplying it for their students, not their employer. Weird as hell to rub someone’s nose in the fact their students are trapped in a school system that doesn’t even supply teachers with proper access to printed materials. Even Reddit used to run a donor program to help teachers out with the costs.
The way I read their comment was pointing out that the employer (the school district) should be providing sufficient printing. :shrug: But there’s many ways to interpret, I suppose
It’s like tipping… It happens because we let it. It’s so incredibly common that literally poor teachers are paying for basic supplies the school doesn’t when they should look those kids in the eyes and tell them they are sorry and that their society and school have failed them and to go home and tell their parents to vote differently.
Sure, you can do that once. Then you are out the job. Talking about politics will get you in more trouble than raping a kid.
I went into teaching because I care about making the world a better place. It cost me my marriage, it has sunk me into some of the deepest pits of despair that my mental health could take, it has meant physical and verbal abuse.
Buying pencils for kids is the kind of thing that you don’t mind too much, because at least it is a problem you can fix.
Once, I had a student ask me for a pencil. (He’d ask me everyday - usually in response to me asking why he wasn’t doing his work.) He looked me in the eye, snapped it in half, and asked for another.
I gave it to him. Who cares. I couldn’t fix the sinks which didn’t work and stunk because kids shoved shit into them, but I could fix the fucking pencil.
It’s a terrible job where you are expected to save the world and hated for everything you do. But, as a dog returns to his vomit… It’s part of my soul.
Anyone that would say that to a student who turned up to learn has no business teaching. You don’t take funding problems out on students. It’s not the teacher’s obligation to self fund their classroom, but many do it because often nobody else is. Reading someone talk about that and the message you decide is important to share with them is ‘lol you’re paying your employer’ is weirdo behavior.
They get indoctrinated with all kinds of other bullshit. They can take some truth home.
Also spent several hundred just on vinegar and baking soda for labs.
But yeah, I actually had to quit teaching after my divorce because I could no longer afford to do it!
Teachers where I live are constantly asking for donations of basic school supplies, snacks, tissues, and cleaning supplies for classrooms. It is incredibly disheartening.
Execs know teachers are doing it because of internal drive to teach and not for the pay and they take advantage of it in absolutely every way they can.
If teachers want useful posters on the wall, gotta pay for it. If teachers want students to not have to share a worksheet 3:1, teachers will pay for it. It’s incredible not only how much they do for free, but how much they pay out of pocket for the “privilege”
Yeah. The system in the US works on exploiting, crushing, and discarding young teachers. Almost none of the other teachers I met while teaching are still in the profession. You are expected to martyr yourself for the job - I usually didn’t get to eat lunch, because I was busy. I stopped drinking water, because I ended up pissing myself one day when I couldn’t get to the restroom.
I’m old enough such that when I was at primary school (this is years 5-11 for non UKians) there was a computer. Not in every class, no. A computer, on a wheeled trolley that could be moved around. Well actually I think there were probably three. Because there were three floors and no-one was going to move that trolley up and down the stairs. But still it definitely was not one per class.
It was barely used. In fact, the teachers didn’t really know HOW to use it. They actually just let me go at it, because I did know how to work it.
In secondary school (11-15/16), things were somewhat different in that there were slightly more modern computers, most classes had one and there was a dedicated room where there was a classroom number of computers available. This was where we were taught “ICT” which, was essentially showing how to use word processors and spreadsheet software. Again teachers of the time were quite far behind and I’m not exaggerating here, I used to help the teacher, teach this class. But there was no programming, or any advanced use. It was very basic tasks with specific software. All of our written work, even for this class was written with a pen, in an exercise book.
Now, budgets were still terrible. I can be pretty sure about this because I remember that because we DID still do everything on paper, photocopies were handed around the room. Oh they weren’t any flash laser photocopy (well sometimes in secondary school it was). No, these was the kind with the fuzzy purple ink that was hand rolled to make a copy. But we got by.
Now, there’s no doubt we live in a digital world and computing must be taught because we do everything on a phone or computer now and people need to know how to do it. But, there’s still surely a good reason to be doing work in exercise books with a pen and paper? Everything cannot be on a computer.
It still amazes me that laptops are still the cutting edge tech for schools.
General purpose computers have always had major problems with students getting distracted and going off topic, and are a never ending source of tech issues; particular when locked down in a way that still fails to address the previous issues, but makes them fail more often.
Admin is concerned about paper costs? Get every student an Eink reader. Schools are a big enough market to justify specoalized Eink readers that support classroom management style features (e.g. pushing a reading to student in the room).
Don’t want to deal with hand written essays. I was using a digital typewriter as a middle school student 20 years ago.
It’s like requing laptops for every math class because we don’t want to force students to do all their calculations by hand. But that’s not the choice: we have calculators! Even when we let them use calculators, we have a choice of what calculator to give them. We have 4 function calculators, scientific calculators, graphing calculators, symbolic calculators. And we can pick what tool we give students based on the needs of the particular lesson.
All of those are MORE expensive, at scale. If you can just hand 1500 kids a $200 Chromebook that fulfills ALL those functions, that’s $300k, vs 1500 e-ink readers at $40 a pop, 1500 digital typewriters @ $100 apiece, etc. Hell, that scientific calculator ALONE might be $200+ in some markets because Texas Instruments practically has the market cornered (to the point that I had to go to the administration of my school district to show them that the Casio I had was functionally identical).
Unbelievable…
The more I see about education nowadays, the more I realize I would not survive it anymore. So many tests and assignments and whatever, students have barely any time left to think or be bored. Everything gets constantly evaluated.
Trying to keep old stuff alive in a digital world is stupid. I do think that kids need to learn to think and research on their own, so AI and grammar and spelling corrections should be disallowed from the laptops and Chromebooks. Having an algorithm fix everything for you and write your papers is developmentally bad.
-old person
I disagree.
I tutored a college student who had dysgraphia. They originally had a calculator accommodation, but this was removed at the request of the instructor.
The student was in no way incapable of learning the material in the class - a remedial math course mostly on basic statistics and presenting data. But they were incapable of remembering most of the multiplication table.
There’s no reason to force a person to do long division by hand. The student was perfectly capable of understanding the process of calculating an average, but actually doing the problem meant that they were counting out by threes on their hand to do 3x7.
I’ve worked with dyslexic students on writing assignments - they are just as capable of intelligently responding to a writing prompt if you ask them verbally. Why should they be punished because they can’t spell (especially when we had like a decade of NOT TEACHING PHONICS)?
I draw a hard line at generative AI, but as long as the thoughts are theirs, I’ve never been concerned too much with students using tools to help them.
… it’s a problem that’s arisen because class sizes are out of control …
If I may ask, just how large are the classes today?
For reference, in 1980, my 10th grade English class (Mrs. Chase, she was awesome) had 36 students.
That was average for my school at the time.
The BIG classes like general US History (taught by Mr. Conway, who was wildly popular) had 40+ kids.
Mr Conway also kept a real honest to goodness stocks in his class room, so anyone that misbehaved had two options… into the stocks for the class or off to the assistant Vice Prinicpal’s office and spend a day in ISS. (in school suspension)
There would ALWAYS be one jackass Junior in each class that would opt for the stocks, at the start of every year and then NO one EVER caused a beef in Mr. Conway’s classes - or really ANY of the government studies (US History, Civics, Social Studies) deparement classes… Hearing about who chose the stocks and the rumors usually scared the underclassmen shitless, so they rarely ever piped up… except for the really stupid smartasses that always tried to test how far they could go…
The most I dealt with was around 36. I had around 28 chairs.
However, the feeder middle school had class sizes of 60+. There were literal riots, with multiple teachers injured, that the district covered up.
Stocks would absolutely not be allowed. I had a student that spent fifteen minutes screaming and cussing me out, straight to my face in front of a principle. When she said “I wish I wasn’t in your class” and I said “me too” - I got in trouble. (She was mad because I wrote her up for literally just walking into my classroom to sell snacks. She didn’t attend classes, she just did whatever she wanted.)
This was a public school and they tolerated this shit?
Sweet Jesus the standards have fallen.
Is it the parents, school board and administration or a combination of all 3?
White flight and a state that hates education.
The rest of the science department were “emergency certified” - eg, random bachelors degrees.
I know for the fact the district has put teachers in without BACKGROUND CHECKS.
Holy shit. Lemme guess… it’s a southern state and in a majority black district?
Bingo.
First week of the job: “hey, stop talking about your college experiences with the kids. These kids are never going to college, so none of it will ever connect with them.”
It sounds like there should be a platform designed for school. IT can block access to all resources except the platform. Kids log-in to www.my-school.platform.edu and immediately have an answer for:
- what’s the curriculum for today
- what was yesterdays homework
- what was yesterdays lesson
- what tests are coming up
- what’s my personal attendance
- what’s for lunch today
- …
Then there’s not any room for misusing, misunderstanding, or missing-out. Ideally, I’d think a good platform should empower teachers to handle their difficult workload more easily…
Should also have a Teachers view, an Admin view, …
There are multiple such platforms - Canvas, ClassDojo, InfiniteCampus. Heck, you can even go with the free and open source Moodle. Most of these also integrate with useful online tools, like Desmos (graphing calculator) and PHeT (science simulations.)
This can help with workload, because you can often set up things like multiple choice quizzes that grade themselves (but how often should that be your primary way of assessing students?)
The problem is that some skills simply need to be learned with pen and paper. I have taught and tutored chemistry for years - balancing equations and stoichiometry are skills that you can’t really learn on a computer.
There’s also evidence that computer based notetaking is less effective - that students remember less.
That makes a lot of sense. I think there’s plenty of research to back up your claim about writing helping memory, too. I used to try to remember things better by (1) writing it down, (2) reading it aloud, (3) thinking about the next level up.
Number 3 is probably less useful outside fields where you’re constantly trying to “scale” systems… but in any case, it’s a thought experiment that happens to be really good at exposing the boundaries of concepts. Like… “okay, I built one server… now, what if I needed to manage a farm of 1000? What issues then become more pronounced?”
Out of curiosity, do any of these platforms try to marry itself with paper workflows? Maybe stuff like:
- teachers can submit a printable paper doc
- students can print it out as needed, submit the finished result
- students can take pictures of their handwritten notes and store them in a digital journal
- platform comes with handwriting analysis, full-text-search, … all that jazz?
Canvas has a very neat “annotation” tool, where the teacher can upload a document and students can write on it and submit.
I also see a lot of canvas assignments where the answer is in an auto graded quiz, but the teacher has the students take a picture and upload to show their scratch work. This can be added as a “question” to the assignment.
There are good ways to use the tools for sure - I did really like that the auto graded quizzes on canvas could use randomized numbers. Eg, when I did speed/distance/time, I could write a word problem where it would randomize the quantities so each student got a unique quiz and couldn’t cheat.
Tools like PHeT/CK12/other simulation programs are also a godsend. Even working with college chemistry, being able to show visual representations of acid/base dissociation or how to balance an equation makes things so much easier.
The platforms are great - the work flow problems are more consequent to the way the school system is set up, especially in the Title 1 hell schools that are left to fall through the cracks.
From the article:
She also started a parent group with 75 members that’s asking the district to allow students to keep Chromebooks at school rather than take them home.
Seems like such a good idea to leave that at the school. I had a relative who was a teacher, she rarely ever assigned homework. She always said it was her job to teach them in those 6 hours, and the rest of the day was theirs. She did have a weekend workshop for kids that needed tutoring, and after class hours, but in general, leave school at school and be a kid.
I wish my teachers had that attitude. I got sent home with hours of homework almost every day. I particularly remember my raging bitch of an 8th grade math teacher who would assign 100s of problems a night and give you zero points if you didn’t do all of them. My mom even backed me up on arguing about that shit. If I couldn’t get it done during my study period and lunch hour I didn’t do it. I had better things to do with my time after school.
“it’s only an hour of homework!”
-Each of your 6 teachers
Then they act like I have a learning disability even though I’m acing all the tests and it’s literally just doing the bare minimum of homework that’s fucking my grades up.
She’s (the relative) lucky she can do that. Some districts or schools have homework policies. As I am finishing up my master’s for elementary education, if I can get away with NOT assigning homework then that’s what I will do. They are kids and need their mental breaks as well. There’s research that shows homework doesn’t correlate to better learning or growth. It’s just busy work and play is really good for kids’ minds.
If anything, I will encourage them to read and tell me what cool thing(s) they are reading about the next morning!
I wish you luck I really do. If the parents insist the kids rest of day is structured I hope they get sports, or the scouts, or maker spaces, or library, or something worthwhile.
I think we all know what is wrong today…
You got that boomer energy.
That’s the one good side effect of AI, it makes people want to move away from technology where it’s not really necessary
also counterproductive, handwriting is better for retention.
Handwriting is better for retention if you are good at writing notes. Not everybody can write fast and legibly and still listen to and comprehend the lecture.
Of course there are kids with disabilities or nuerodivergence, and common sense should handle what is best for those kids individually. We’re talking about broad policy here, laptops should not be the default.
Which is why we practice it. Why we teach it.
My son is 12, ADHD (&others) and in special education. His first semester in middle school last year, he smashed his Chromebook, on purpose, to break it. Hes now only allowed to use a computer for state testing. Luckily, he is in small classrooms with the IEP so nearly all his work is on paper. I refuse to sign the permissionfor computer use and the teachers agree and haven’t faught me on it at all.
He recently told me he didn’t know what barbaric meant. Annoyed, realizing we lost the pocket dictionary some time ago, I went to the bookstore and got the best dictionary they had. I also, saw this:
So I grabbed it. There are lessons and quizzes in it teaching root word definitions. We’ve done a couple lessons now. I have him take notes, writing the word and the definition in his own words, unless it a short definition, then it’s easy. But then, he can use those notes to take the quiz. Ive done this so he can learn to note take. It will only take a few open note quizes to realize the importance of reading them back, and structuring your notes in a way that are useful. It’s all practice, and it needs to start early. My son’s handwriting is shit, absolute garbage. But he’s been writing everything at school since fall of '24, and there has been improvement in spelling, legibility and vocabulary, exponentially in the last couple years.
The whole point of writing is to convey a message. If ones writing isn’t legible, it is lost, and this needs to be understood by students. They can adapt to their needs.
I have ADHD also, I worked very hard at my schoolwork, I wasn’t diagnosed until far after I left school. I used short form I made up myself, and just got better at writing main ideas down. The schools… Are so dumbed down today, even in gen ed. These (middle school) teachers are not giving hour lectures expecting these kids to take proper notes. But,that doesn’t mean kids can’t get better with practice.
My son’s writing is garbage, so I have him write more. Being bad at something isn’t an excuse to give up. Being he is in special edu, and I can’t goddamn go to work (I’m so ready to go back to work omg) I spend a lot of energy stuffing as much education I can into him at home in support of the teachers’ efforts.
If an artist is bad a drawing hands, they could, in theory, never draw a hand in their work. OR, they can draw all the goddamn hands until they are satisfied and learned how to do it comfortably. Idk. “They can’t write fast and legibly” is just not an excuse for the average student IMO, because notetaking is a skill that is learned.
The fine motor control that comes of handwriting is critical if he likes to tinker or discovers any sort of work/hobby that requires manual dexterity.
Keep pushing on that, also, get a book on how to print like you’re writing the dialogue in a comic book or how to print like an architect making a blueprint. If he can work out the shapes and spacing, he can develop his own legible style in time and move on to a fusion-style cursive with those print shapes… It realy does make a difference in note-taking.
My dad was a design draftsman and taught me how to do that block print that I’d see on blueprints, and I have a super easy to read cursive based on that now.
Great tips. I love the Dogman series because it shows kids folks with ADHD can do cool things too. Anytime we can work a special interest in, it is helpful
Maybe as we advance, today we are still at the basics.
Like, this is what I’m working with. He is in Special Edu, and this is the improvement. It’s terrible, but we continue. Cursive helped me a bit, especially the fusion style you mention. I’m glad I’ve found this book. I have him write (and rewrite) a lot over the years, (this is not his best work at all) but I’ve pulled the ideas out my bum honestly. I’m glad this book has structure. We can do 15-20 mins, or a half a lesson, at a time so he doesn’t get overwhelmed and he can feel empowered to write. He spelled generosity almost right the first go, and hearing him being proud of that was, so cool.
Block printing is a cool skill, I wish I could do it. It’s the step you take after learning to write legibly, how to write beautifully. I’ll be happy to get him in the lines lol thats truly a useful skill your father taught you :)
It’s more important for me (for my son) to understand vocabulary because its a precursor for critical thinking and even emotional regulation. You can’t talk about why youre mad, or how your feeling if you dont have the vocabulary to do so. I’m just sneaking writing and note taking skills into it vocabulary lessons. Root word understanding grant you access to the whole language. That is so important imo
You: I’ve pulled the ideas out my bum honestly.
Me, reading: This is intuitive genius. Seriously.
You’ve said your strategy essentially comes from listening/observing closely and winging it, but honestly what you’re achieving just through keeping at it every way you can is amazing. Apart from not being more condensed (smaller, tighter) that handwriting is actually more legible than I’ve seen from more than a few adults, including the slight nod to the presence of lines. I am not exaggerating.
Your creativity and temerity are both inspiring. Your son is lucky to have you.
Oh, I recognize that ‘script!’ Just like my younger brother’s when we were kids.
I like that you’re getting sneaky with it. The thing with the comic book lettering or the architectural stuff is that it is all capitals. Is a good start for just getting the shapes down and the basics are of course squares.
My younger brother was an emergency C-section and he came out fully purple as the umbilical cord had wrapped around his neck and was choking him…
Ended up with impared development due to lack of oxygen and he was diagnosed on the Autism spectrum - used to be called Aspergers… He would literally sit on a pillow on the floor and rock back and forth for hours and God save you if you touched him. He’d freak out. Too much stimulus. When he was still an infant, folks had to feed him by leaning him back and putting a small throw pillow on his belly and propping his bottle on that.
Touch was too much.
Dad taught him to write with the architectural lettering and he’s now in his late 50’s and has a beautiful script.
It takes time and it’s just a matter of finding something the kid can latch on to and be excited by. Brother loved Star Trek and sci-fi in general so we ran with that.
Part of his adult education classes he was taking a few years ago involved writing a page of whatever he wanted… So he wrote a short science fiction story - as he put it - more of a part of a chapter of a story he’d had in his head… It was quite well written!
I told him he should keep at it once the class was over. Instead he decided to focus on cooking afterwards. Who’da thought?
He’s a fantastic cook, eats better than I do - is all organic and whole foods. So funny how we all turned out.
Other conditions exist. I have auditory processing disorder and one part of it is an involuntary disabling of my audio processing when my brain is trying to focus on something, particularly anything else to do with language like note-taking. My ears will “hear” but my brain won’t.
It wasn’t completely debilitating, but it made certain kinds of classes inordinately difficult for me. Discussion based classes were a nightmare for me, and no amount of practice could change how my brain works. So instead I pursued STEM where the notes are math and I could work ahead and tune in if I got stuck.
That being said, handwritten notes are still definitely the way to go in math!
Same!!! I have the auditory thingy and dyslexia, so writing (words, not math) was hell on earth for me for most of highschool. Getting to use a laptop in 11th and 12th grade was a godsent.
But in 10th grade I actually did something that mostly solved my hatred of handwriting: I taught myself calligraphy and whole-arm-writing. Now I love handwriting, don’t have pain doing it anymore, people compliment my writing, etc.
Though I still can’t listen to stuff while writing 🤷 luckily I was able to use a laptop in lectures (philosophy is very notes heavy), and after college it becomes irrelevant, thank god.
I also have auditory processing disorder. It sucks. Why I always liked teachers who wrote on the board as they lectured, I’d even read the chapter from the book instead of listening to the teacher. Thats great you found what worked for you! You found what worked and became successful despite your struggles! That’s resiliency!
