Digital tyrants

Or robot overlords.

One of the big ideas this year is to start using a system called Engrαδэ to record things such as attendance and results. I’ve been keeping records of both for some time now, but this is going to take things to a whole new level.

No doubt, in the official literature, Engrαδэ is some highly valuable pedagogical tool, but the impression I got about it at the presentation was that it’s a stick with which to beat students. Some people might quite like that idea, but I think it’s also a stick with which we teachers unwittingly beat ourselves because we’re now going to to be giving students tests on a weekly basis; and homework.

Why? What’s the point of tests every week? What am I meant to test them on? How is that going to make the slightest difference? How am I going to devise a test which isn’t trivial time-filler?  How are the tests going to be valid if proper test conditions cannot be established in a classroom? What’s the point if each test is different and on something different? How can these possibly form a coherent whole or be interpreted coherently? The whole thing seems to be an exercise in producing numbers to feed Engrαδэ, but not in producing anything truly meaningful. (And why doesn’t someone think of all the trees which are going to be fed into a photocopier for something so ephemeral?)

Homework is exactly the same. I largely fail to see the point unless there’s a very good reason – something that must absolutely be finished off, for example –, but I don’t want to be dishing it out for the sake of uselessly dishing it out just to satisfy some insatiable digital monster.

I also haven’t forgotten last year when it took me a month to mark something because other things kept interrupting, and I can see the same thing happening again. I can see my free time being vacuumed up relentlessly. I can see a lot of migraines this year.

I keep trying to tell myself that this is just another start-of-term mess, and that it’ll all be forgotten when practical issues part the curtains and admit reality. I don’t think it’s going to happen because the digital lash doesn’t sleep and never goes on holiday.