Category / technology

by nflanagan

How about a Pause on the Race to Embed AI in Schools?

I haven’t written much about AI and education, for several reasons.

First, there are already many people writing compellingly and with considerable expertise about the uses and misuses of AI in the classroom. Some of those people will show up in this blog. Follow them. Read what they write.

Also, some years ago I developed a reputation for being a cranky Luddite. I wrote pieces about the downside of the ubiquitous online gradebook, accessible to parents 24/7, and other uses of computer programs that added to teachers’ workloads and didn’t fit with the important content and skills I was teaching students (lots of students) the old-fashioned way. The real costs of “free” programs and apps, no matter how glittery and hip, seemed obvious to me. Why didn’t other educators see this?

This came to a head when I was invited to be part of an online panel on ed technologies. Presenters sent me the language they planned to use to introduce me—did I approve? I confirmed, and then they messaged back: the bio had been created by ChatGPT. Ha-ha.

Finally, I haven’t written much about AI because I just find it hard to conceptualize how it could be useful in the classroom. In other fields, perhaps—with a lot of caveats, oversight and suspicion—but it runs contrary to the essential purpose of teaching and learning. Doesn’t it?

It’s never seemed right to let machines do the ‘thinking’ or ‘creating’ that is better done, or at least attempted, daily, by children. In short, I don’t get it. Maybe that’s because I haven’t been enlightened? So—shut up already?

I think many, if not most, practicing educators are in the same boat: Unclear about what AI actually is, and what use could be made of AI tools in their vital mission to make children independent thinkers, evaluators and creators.

For starters, who’s cool with Big Data collecting info on our public school kiddos’ engagement with their products? NEPC Report on digital platforms:  

‘While educators may see platforms as neutral tools, they are in fact shaped by competing interests and hidden imperatives. Teachers, students, and administrators are only one market. The other market involves data on performance, usage patterns and engagement—data flowing to advertisers, data brokers and investors, often without users’ knowledge or consent.’ 

A pretty good synopsis of what AI is, from Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo:

“AI is being built, even more than most of us realize, by consuming everyone else’s creative work with no compensation. It’s less ‘thought’ than more and more refined statistical associations between different words and word patterns.” He goes on to make the salient point that the AI “products” being produced that will be “privately owned and sold to us.”

Doesn’t sound like something that schools need to quickly embrace, what with all our other problems, like teaching kids to read, rising absence rates and budgets stripped of our ability to feed children a nutritious breakfast and lunch.

Add in the environmental concerns and rampant intellectual property theft to teachers’ uncertainty about dumping more new, unvetted toys into an already-crammed curriculum. So I was thoroughly surprised to see the AFT get on the “AI in the classroom!!” bandwagon.

Why not take a pause—let’s call it a shutdown—on the race to embed AI in our schools? Why not sort through those competing interests and hidden imperatives? We’ve been bamboozled by climbing on attractive but ultimately damaging educational bandwagons before. Just who wants us on this one?

Well, scammers. And the folks who turned DEI into something to be avoided. Clueless Tik-Toking middle schoolers could up their game with AI. And right-wing edu-site The 74 says educators can save six hours a week by using AI to make worksheets, tests and exit tickets. Really? That’s an awful lot of worksheets.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to approach this transformative technology with great caution, holding fast to the evergreen principle of teaching and learning being a social endeavor? To look at the available research before being bedazzled by something new?

‘Participants, mostly undergraduate and graduate students, who constructed essays with the assistance of ChatGPT exhibited less brain activity during the task than those participants who were asked to write on their own. The AI-users were much less likely to be able to recall what they had written and felt less ownership over their work. Independent evaluators who reviewed the essays found the AI-supported ones to be lacking in individuality and creativity.’

If you want to read better pieces on AI, many are hyperlinked in this blog. But here are a few folks whose words and thoughts come from places of deep knowledge and experience:

Audrey Watters, the best Ed-Tech thinker on the planet, for my money.

Pete Buttigieg, who thinks ahead of trends. Stop worrying about when he’s going to run for President and start absorbing his ideas on politics and relevant policy. Including AI.

Lucian Truscott, who writes about many things and made me understand why AI may ultimately fail: The men who run the big AI companies would do well to think through what they are doing with all those big buildings and all that electricity they consume. The “answer,” such as it is, to what they are seeking to accomplish may not exist, or it may be simpler than they think.

Educator Alfie Kohn, who points out that those most receptive to this technology are the people who know the least about it. This piece made my skin crawl.

My friend Peter Greene does a better job of debunking AI crapola than anyone I know. I credit this to his decades of classroom experience, during which he Paid Attention to Things—things more important than launching new products and making the big bucks.

So why should anyone pay attention to what a tech skeptic writes about AI in schools?

Because we’ll all be lured into making photos come to life, or relying on a questionable AI answer to an important question, or laughing at Russ Vought as Grim Reaper. Sticky and fun, but ultimately shallow, inconsequential.  Not what school-based learning should be.

Earlier this year, on a day when I made a (delicious) strawberry pie, I clicked on a song-writing app. Give us some lyrics, and a musical style, and we’ll write a song for you.

Here is my song: Strawberry Pie. Sticky and fun, but not much effort on my part.

by nflanagan

Teachers Work in Systems We Did Not Create

Back in the day, I used to go to ed-tech conferences, especially the Michigan Association for Computers Users in Learning (MACUL) gathering. Like everyone else, I was there to find that elusive app or device that would make my work easier.

For maybe a decade, MACUL was the hot ticket, worth burning a personal day, sitting in ballrooms looking at guys in logoed polo shirts and khakis, narrating fast-paced product-focused PowerPoints with amusing memes sprinkled throughout. The first question you got, wandering through the massive exhibits hall was “Are you in charge of tech purchases for your school?”

Nope, I wasn’t.

What I was looking for was new ways of thinking about education, specifically music education. It seemed to me that music, as a human endeavor, was way more than what I was teaching: how to play an instrument and replicate pre-written pieces, as accurately as possible. These were skills that were fairly easy to standardize and grade, but 180 degrees away from creativity and improvisation, the capacity to play with musical ideas, and evaluate your own results. Not to mention things like joy and fun.

I was working in a system that privileged the standard school band, including competitions evaluating fidelity to everything from instrumentation to tempo markings. The party line on music education is that it’s creative, but secondary music education often leaves little room for students’ imagination or original work. The teamwork and drive for excellence are valuable, but usually end when a student graduates.

Don’t get me wrong—learning to play a musical instrument and read music are useful, foundational skills in ways that many folks don’t see or appreciate. If I ran the world, all kids would learn to play an instrument, to understand and create their own music, and play daily with others.

But how could I encourage my students to try out their own musical ideas? To have fun, even jam, without a conductor and sheet music and—God forbid—weekly playing tests, speaking of pre-set system reqs… This seemed to be something that technology might do.

 Now, 20 years later, there are plenty of creative music apps to carry around on your phone or tablet. But what the techies were selling, back then, fell into three buckets:

The first was programs to make school administration easier— attendance, budgets, scheduling,etc. The second group were things to make teachers’ non-instructional duties easier—grading, standards, lesson planning, and so on. The third cluster was programs for students, most of which were usable by classes, in computer labs and directed by teachers.

There was lots of new! exciting! software, but nobody seemed to be interested in developing programs that let students experiment with the tools of music. At least, not for schools, where performing concerts and musical events for parents and the community were the ultimate curricular goals.

It was a system I didn’t create, and innovative technologies were no help in budging it. Even in ways that I knew would be good for kids, building their confidence and exploring their individual musicianship.

I thought about that today when I read this article in WIRED: Microsoft, OpenAI, and a US Teachers’ Union Are Hatching a Plan to ‘Bring AI Into the Classroom.’  The National Academy for AI Instruction will make artificial intelligence training accessible to educators across the country, a first-of-its-kind $23 million initiative funded by the tech companies to bring free training to teachers.

First thought: Do teachers WANT to bring AI into their classrooms? If so, for what purposes?

Second thought: Why is the AFT jumping on this bandwagon? To “get ahead” of some imaginary curve? To get “free” (and none of this is truly free) stuff?

Third thought: Since AI is essentially composed of stolen content, what does this do for teachers who still believe in nurturing students’ imagination? Somebody created all the literature, art and other media that goes into the giant maw of AI, so there are also ethical questions.

Final thought: Why are we ‘training’ educators to do what OpenAI thinks they should be doing? Did we ask teachers first—what would you like to know about AI? How do you think it could be useful in your classroom?

Once again, we’re forcing teachers into systems they did not create. And that’s never a good idea.

by nflanagan

Christmas Music: The Good, the Bad and the Downright Ugly

Music is my life. I play several instruments and sing. I majored (and double minored) in music in college and am active in civic groups and church music as participant and conductor. I even went to flute camp (for adults) last summer. And I spent 30-odd years as a public school music teacher.

So– I have a love-hate relationship with Christmas music. Mostly love. But.

December can be brutal for musicians—and for school music teachers, brutal on multiple levels including community expectations and endless rounds of kids-on-risers. Music teachers become de facto activity directors, lurching from frigid parade to caroling at the nursing home. 

But still—there’s the rich opportunity to teach excited kids something about their cultural inheritance and surround. Which includes a clear definition of the divide between music as spiritual practice and music as auditory clutter.

Because you really can’t get away from Christmas music in America in December (or November), hard as you might try. People of other faith traditions, people who don’t believe in any of the Christmas iconography (like Santa or Jesus), people who loathe the downtown decorations and the Hallmark channel—we’re all stuck when Santa Claus comes to town.

For many people, Christmas music becomes irritating aural wallpaper, especially if they’re tuned into one of the omnipresent satellite radio Holly-day stations, or actually paying attention to what’s on the PA system as they’re perusing cheese in the dairy aisle. Because most of the commercial Christmas music readily available in businesses and on Sirius is, frankly, somewhere between uninspired and dreadful. I don’t want to hear—to choose just one example—Burl Ives at any time of year, let alone at holly, jolly Christmas.

I started listening to Christmas music on my little portable record player (Christmas gift from my parents), beginning with the LP records from the gas station ($1 will Fill-up!), where Percy Faith and Ella Fitzgerald were interspersed with the Chipmunks and the NY Philharmonic. When I got my flute, in fifth grade, I was invited to play Angels We Have Heard on High for the church Christmas pageant, a gig I kept through junior high because I liked the wings and halo, as well as the tune. I was hooked.

So I started collecting (and studying) seasonal music as a teenager, eventually making yearly cassette tapes of my favorite cuts. Cassettes morphed into CDs in the 1990s. I made annual gift CDs for family and friends—then eventually, due to the magic of iTunes, custom-selected CD playlists and discs for my regular customers. I requested multiple catalogs from folk and jazz artists and ordered new CDs, unheard, in the fall. At one time, I owned 500 holiday CDs, and had a catalog of over 3000 digital cuts on iTunes.

 Yeah, I know—when does a hobby become a sickness?

The last year I made CDs was 2018, when I realized most people no longer had the equipment to play a CD. I still make my own annual December playlists on Spotify—there are still arrangers and artists creating beautiful new seasonal music. I love listening, but I am really picky about what I am listening to.

Here’s the thing, though, about so-called Christmas music: it’s familiar, or will become familiar in time. A tune you recognize, when you hear it again, come December. We don’t have a lot of those commonly remembered classic songs anymore, holding our culture together. Nostalgia is a part of cultural norms.

For centuries, there was mostly sacred music—all of which has cultural value, whether the listener is a believer in the divine, or not. O Come, O Come, Emmanuel dates back to the 9th century, for example. How often do young listeners authentically interface with such a different time, except through music?

Commercial music has been shaped by the march of new technologies and low-bar popular opinion (lookin’ at you, Frosty). Children no longer know folk songs sung around campfires in the 19th century—unless they learn in school to cross the wide prairie with Betsy from Pike. We are losing bits of our cultural heritage, including traditional carols.

Whatever you want to listen to today is immediately available on your phone. But if you haven’t explored the truly glorious—magnificent or austere or funky–songs and carols of the season, how will you know what to ask for, to know what musicians have created from a simple tune?

In collecting mountains of Christmas music, I have favorite versions of all the songs, of course. But when I want to relax on Christmas Eve, with a glass of wine, this is what I put on: https://open.spotify.com/track/5c0sQY87Iw7qUu46N31f3v. 

by nflanagan

Billionaire Ideas: Andrew, Bill and Elon

So—it was just one of those re-posted memes: a chalkboard suggesting that the “old days”—when the very rich built and named hospitals, schools and libraries—were preferable to whatever the very rich are doing with their money today.

There are a lot of ways to argue against that tossed-off sentiment: We shouldn’t have to rely on the beneficence of the wealthy in order to have good public services, for starters. Some of that wealth was ill-gotten, and some philanthropists were Not Good People, as well. Why can’t everybody be like McKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos)?

On the other hand, I was born in a hospital named for a local benefactor. I was a card-carrying patron of a Carnegie Library and attended college where every damned building seemed to be funded by someone with lots more money than I’d ever have.

Furthermore, Forbes magazine reinforced my belief that the 21st century uber-rich aren’t very forthcoming any more with dough for public buildings and programs: How generous are the super-rich, really? Not very, according to Forbes’ research. The members of the 2023 Forbes 400 list have collectively given more than $250 billion to charity, by our count—less than 6% of their combined net worth.

Which gets to the point of why I originally posted the meme: The mega-affluent today are busy going up in space in rocket ships, abusing low-paid, NON-unionized employees, and controlling national elections with underhanded tactics.

I’d rather have the theatres, hospitals, academic buildings and libraries. Or—here’s a thought—what about someone with fabulous wealth funding a climate change initiative? Or ending poverty?

Andrew Carnegie funded the building of 2,509 “Carnegie Libraries” worldwide between 1883 and 1929. Of those, 1,795 were in the United States: 1,687 public and 108 academic libraries. Others are scattered throughout Europe, South Africa, Barbados, Australia, and New Zealand. He also funded museums, established an endowment for international peace, supported scientific research, and other civic initiatives, including the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He bought or upgraded pipe organs in over 7600 churches.

And, yup, Andrew Carnegie was a robber baron in the most derogative sense of the word, using violence and ruthlessness in controlling the ill-paid and exploited workers who built his fortune. He was also an immigrant, who came to America penniless, and you know how Americans love a rags-to-riches tale. Biographers suggest he had an attack of conscience as he aged, and spent more and more of his wealth on civic projects.

In posting the chalkboard meme, I drew a lot of commentary because I mentioned Carnegie and all those libraries. Surprisingly, a lot of the negative feedback came from librarians, who popped up with passionate responses about Carnegie’s insider trading, sending goons to beat up strikers and trying to suppress the uprisings of the great unwashed by building them libraries.

It occurred to me that those librarians were universally well-read and not about to blindly worship old, filthy rich, controlling white men. Although, you know, thanks for the library.

Still. Although nobody can exactly defend the Titans of the Gilded Age, they left a lot of architecture and institutions for us to use, more than a century later. What have our still-living titans done with their immense wealth?

Bill Gates has funded the building of computer science centers at four universities (including, ironically, Carnegie Mellon), and purchased 40 square miles in the AZ desert west of Phoenix to build his own city of 200K residents, among other projects. From Salon:

There’s a deep-seated belief in libertarian-rampant Silicon Valley that the government and our political processes are slow and messy; to that end, many techies, mad with power, have attempted to start their own partially or fully-privatized cities. Gates’ entire philanthropic vision, exemplified by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is predicated on the idea that rich people and technocrats know best how to manage the levers of society, and the rest of us peons should sit back and let the rich techies run our lives. 

If you’re an educator, you will have felt the Gates Foundation’s impact, from Common Core standards to teacher assessments to breaking up big schools into smaller ones. Have money, will implement. Then declare many of these “promising” concepts failures. Maybe the teachers weren’t following the curriculum with fidelity?

Honestly? I’d rather have buildings and state-of-the-art equipment than Billionaire Ideas changing our fundamental institutions.

Which brings us to Elon Musk, who has promised his and Donald Trump’s  proposed economic policies could lead to “initial severe overreaction” and “temporary hardship” in the economy if Trump wins the election. Trump’s mass deportations and Musk’s $2 trillion cut to federal spending could disrupt industries, lead to labor shortages, and increase prices.

Hmmm. Couldn’t he just build us a nice hospital or school or library?

Carnegie Library in Howell, Michigan.

by nflanagan

A Semi-Elderly Teacher’s Reflection on the Digital World and Education

So—I’m a retired teacher, with more than three and a half decades of classroom practice under my belt. Supposedly, I should be sitting at home, enjoying sunsets and repeating how glad I am that I’m no longer in the classroom.

I actually know a few retired teachers like that—glad to be golfing, disinterested in educational politics—but not many. For those of us who invested our lives in public education, what’s happening in public schools right now is an insult to the low-paid, little-understood work we did to build good citizens in divergent communities; it’s a betrayal of our commitment to our students.

Watching curricula being destroyed and public schools defunded by voucher schemes is soul-crushing. Maybe the most frustrating thing is the naïve belief that technology is going to save us, that students most need screen-delivered, standardized content, not face-to-face human relationships with well-educated adults, who can help them make sense of disciplinary knowledge.

Every aspect of becoming truly educated depends on our students’ ability to comprehend and evaluate information. To think that students aren’t negatively impacted by the unfiltered digital stew surrounding them is worse than naïve. We have not served our students well, offering up their test data (legally mandated, of course) to corporations, or letting them zone out digitally, while in school with their fellow humans.

I remember, back in the 1990s, my colleagues’ collective consternation over Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft Auto, when they were the hot ticket with our middle schoolers. Does spending six hours a day in front of a screen, shooting things or wrecking cars, have an impact on students’ curiosity or kindness or any other pro-social habits? Guess we were going to find out.

I thought of that when I read this headline: Uvalde families sue Instagram and Call of Duty maker over deadly school attack. ‘Unholy trinity’ of Instagram, Activision and Daniel Defense accused of ‘working to convert alienated boys into mass shooters.’

The NYTimes recently ran a feature article on a family whose 13-year old daughter was spending her whole ninth-grade school year without the internet, a phone, a computer or even a camera with a screen.

The benefits of learning to live without dependence on social media seemed pretty obvious to me. Communication with her family would happen the old-fashioned way: letters, via snail mail. A school year like that—this was a boarding school, in the Australian wild, hundreds of miles from home—could shape a personality, even a lifetime. A year at this school also costs $55,000.

So—some people are willing to pay big bucks for their children to develop apart from 24/7 connectivity. And there seems to be a building wave of acknowledgement that digital media has done a number on teenagers. Not to mention our neighborhoods, civic organizations, schools and families.

Half of all adults in America get ‘at least some’ of their news from social media. And the results of that—the mistrust of mainstream media, the ease of delivery, the alternative facts—means that ‘truth’ is illusive in the political realm, a situation that matters greatly right now.

We used to argue, back in the day, about the advisability of using white boards, if the ability to ‘publish’ student work online would make them more motivated, and whether calculators would render students unable to, well, calculate. One-to-one devices were going to be the saving grace.

But it turns out that corporations were way ahead of us—Google, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, X, Tik-Tok—and pretty much in control of what our students see and potentially think. For better and for (much) worse, schools are now fighting for their share of the attention economy.

Social media outsources the monitoring and managing of this colossal data load to poorly paid workers in Africa and Asia. Ever had your innocent Facebook post taken down as “inappropriate?” That’s why. Mis-information and dis-information are now central to public life.

No, technology and digital media are not going to save us, or drag our schools into the 21st century. Technology, in fact, has made possible the distribution of propaganda that threatens our lives and core beliefs. And social media harvests its core product—information and content—from us. And from our children. For free.

I just finished reading (old-fashioned book) Our Biggest Fight, the in-print manifesto of Project Liberty: ‘leading a movement of people who want to take back control of their lives in the digital age by reclaiming a voice, choice, and stake in a better internet.’ 

Sounds good, no? I’m less sanguine than the CEO of Project Liberty, Frank McCourt Jr.. about the prospect of a citizen-led withdrawal from the addictive hold social media has on American adults, and especially on American kids. McCourt says we need great stories to turn this around, and reclaim the power of the internet—and I’m not saying he’s wrong. Only that teachers and schools have been trying to tell great, non-digital stories about our history and values for decades, and it’s an uphill battle.

You may have noticed that this semi-elderly retired teacher has so far avoided the topic of AI. I’m only too familiar with being pitched on the magical powers of a developing technological marvel to make things “easier” for schools, teachers, learning, etc. etc. Peter Greene has posted a number of great blogs on the folly of believing AI is what we educators have been waiting for.

Here’s Sarah Kendzior’s take:

What gets marketed as “artificial intelligence” is plagiarism: scraped off bits of real people’s ideas, devoid of context or credit.

Google’s AI Overview is worse, though. It seems set on killing you.

“How many rocks should I eat each day?” people asked Google. AI Overview responded that people should eat at least one small rock per day because they contain healthy vitamins and nutrients. The source was an Onion article, but AI cannot discern satire.

And so it goes.

by nflanagan

Star Tech: The Next Generation of Record-Keeping

In her last year of a degree program in Justice Studies, my daughter took a course called “Surveillance in Society.” The readings and discussion were around intrusions into personal privacy and data made possible by technology. Dear Daughter and I had many amusing conversations about some of her assignments—“Are Bar Codes the Mark of the Beast? Discuss.”—which struck me as paranoid in the extreme. Her professor was obsessed with our imminent loss of civil liberty, always urging his undergrads to be suspicious of anyone asking for personal information, and, presumably, scanning the sky for black helicopters.

However—I have been thinking a lot about the use of technology to gather data and “streamline” normal school processes, like testing, attendance and grading, to present an image of a “21st century school.”  Here is a simple story about data collection and our belief that All Technology is Good.

In 1998, my district opened a new middle school, full of state-of-the-art technological systems. We were the envy of the other buildings, with fully networked software to handle all our data needs. We got some training and the big pitch—our new procedures would save time, paper and man-hours, give us more accurate data, impress parents with e-communications, yada yada,

Under Old Attendance procedures, every teacher took attendance once, at the same time every morning, recorded it in their grade/attendance book, and sent a student to the office, with an attendance form, printed on scrap paper from recycle bins. Secretaries recorded these on a master list, and handled absence data for students who came/left during the day. Teachers got a copy of the master list, to help confirm absences when students needed to make up work.

Under New, Improved Attendance procedures, every teacher had a computer, with separate attendance book and gradebook functions. Teachers were now required to take attendance every hour and enter absences and tardies on the computer within a five-minute window. We were not allowed to keep the attendance program open on our computer desktops (because our gradebooks, protected by the same password, might be accessed by devious students)—so we had to log in every hour.

Because this was 1998, the server’s horsepower was severely strained by 40 teachers logging in simultaneously, and it would take 30-60 seconds for the program to load. Teachers who forgot to take attendance within 5 minutes would be called by the office (where a secretary now sat, monitoring the data coming in every hour), disrupting teachers’ lessons. If someone had a missing assignment, you had to toggle between attendance and grade programs to discover whether the child had actually been absent.

A process that had taken two minutes of teacher-time daily suddenly began to take two minutes every hour. Best-case scenario, teachers would lose ten extra minutes of instructional time each day: 50 minutes/week, four class periods per month, 36 class periods per school year, or six full days of instructional time. Taking attendance.

Lest you think I’m being overdramatic (or are dying to tell me that faster computing and better software have eliminated problems and made attendance-taking an absolute joy)—I tell this story not to whine about record-keeping, but to question our automatic goal of “efficiency” and the uses and purposes of all K-12 tech-enhanced data collection.

The state requires daily absent/present data, and that to ferret out kids who aren’t actually attending school but were counted for funding purposes. A student who went AWOL would not necessarily be picked up any quicker under the new system, and most of our mid-day leavers were signed out to go to the orthodontist with their mom, anyway.

The new system made data-entry mistakes six times more likely and kept a secretary busy checking on students who were marked present one hour, but absent the other five due to teacher error. I had great sympathy for “careless” teachers who rushed through the attendance procedure to get started on, you know, teaching—only to be monitored and chastised later. I was one of them.

Nobody in the office could explain why or how, precisely, the new system was helping us do a better job of serving kids. The on-line gradebooks also came with unanticipated problems—teachers who didn’t post enough grades (remember when formative data included things that weren’t numbers?), the amount of time now required to deal with anxious parents, and so on.

The most obvious reason to question always-available online gradebooks is that responsibility for turning in work and monitoring a running performance record should belong to students, especially in secondary settings. We have always had periodic reporting to parents—four or six times a year, or in some cases, weekly progress reports. Any more than that elevates grades over actual learning and encourages students to let mom be in charge of their education.

Tech-based surveillance of students is now on steroids. In a thoughtful post entitled How Much Should I Track My Kid? Ann Helen Peterson says this:

My parents trusted me because I had earned their trust. Sometimes I stretched that trust, but I was constantly figuring out what felt too risky, what felt right or wrong, who I didn’t want to get in a car with. Maybe that sounds like a lot of discernment for a teen. But how else do we figure out who we are? My parents could’ve lectured me about “making good decisions” all they wanted; I only knew how to make them by finding myself in situations far from them where I had to.

The same principle applied to my grades, to my online use, to how I talked to boys and figured out friendships. In high school, I would see my exact grade around twice during the quarter, when a teacher would distribute printouts that included all graded assignments and your current percentage.

Schools pay attention to what they value. We collect data first, and decide how to manage it later, a pattern repeatedly endlessly in thousands of schools. We assume that everything can be done faster, cheaper and better through technology. Sometimes, the rationale runs backwards—we adopt the technology, and then invent reasons for why we need it.