Online Schoolwork a Pandora’s Box
Your Feb. 2 article “A Note From Teacher--Delivered by Internet” was subtitled “. . . Privacy is an issue.” As a credentialed teacher with a master’s degree and 10 years’ teaching experience, I submit to you that the idea of bringing grades, lesson plans, assignments and homework hotlines into every home in Orange County poses many more important issues than that of privacy. This technology may have merit, but educators need to beware.
If students can access homework assignments at home, then why will they bother to take out a pencil and a piece of paper and write down an assignment when it is given in class? No cogent reason.
And, then logically, there is no cogent reason to pay attention in class, or to even attend class. Better yet, what’s to prevent a well-intentioned parent from calling up homework assignments for a student? In my teaching career, it has not been abnormal to find parents or older siblings who complete out-of-class assignments for students who are “too busy,” “overworked,” “stressed out” or “don’t understand it.”
Potentially, in a family where this practice is status quo, homework could be completed before a student even returns home from a day at school. Also, is homework so difficult and so breakdown-provoking that most students wrestle with its completion?
Why do we give homework? To reinforce, to practice, to participate. Online assignments and homework help lines give students the message that “You don’t need to do it yourself.”
The issue of posting assignments and lesson plans, from my vantage point, invites too many people into my classroom. I don’t mind visitors, but it would be nice to know who is visiting. With Internet access, a student or a parent could compare lessons with other teachers, with other schools or even with other countries. Suddenly every move a teacher makes can be called into question.
With lesson plans online, it won’t be what parents think about the appropriateness, level of difficulty or meaningful nature of a homework assignment; it will be what Aunt Edna the English Ph.D. from Harvard thinks about a homework assignment; it will be what assignments the school down the street is doing in comparison.
Just because technology is available doesn’t mean it is always used to a positive end. Once schools go online, there is less and less reason for students to interact face-to-face with their teachers and peers. Eventually information can be gathered, not created, but gathered, reorganized and submitted for a grade while a student sits in his bedroom with a cordless phone propped on his shoulder and Classic Sports Network blaring in the background.
