In my angst about students not completing my homework, I must have overlooked the fact that my school is implimenting a new homework program that will take a simple five minute class waste of time into a gigantic pain in the ass for hours of my week. Lovely.
Today, I walked in on the teachers who were mid-conversation discussing the new online homework alert system for parents. New system you say? Homework alerts to parents? Online? I hadn’t heard anything, but now that I think about it, some random guys were training the Korean coworkers on some mysterious computer system a few days ago that never boiled up into something I had to do…maybe I need to pay more attention.
Anyway, there is some sort of proprietary database software frontend running with a Korean and English menus. My director listened to my ONE request about a dual language menu when I panned the last computer system we were taught. (Yay!) Anyway, this system is a series of forms that are disguising the raw database tables running beneath the surface.
There are databases for students, teachers, classes, homework, and grades. The database had thankfully already been populated before we ever touched it. Now all I need to do is log in, assign homework to my classes, and issue an alert that goes up on the website for parents. The weird thing is, for all the automation involved in the process, there are several repeated steps that make me think that the person that either designed, or trained the people how to use this database, was not doing their job correctly.
They linked the students table, teachers table, and classes table correctly, but need me to copy the homework in different fields multiple times? That’s redundancy. That’s bad design. That promotes errors. That’s what I spent my money on my very expensive degree learning about NOT doing.
Whatever. Now I have to write down my homework in class, then take 15-20 minutes each day copying it into a computer. We’ll also do comments, evaluations, issue discipline warnings, and several other administrative tasks directly on the computer. Right now, there is only one computer in the teacher’s room. If we all have to do this sort of work, it’ll easily increase the wait to use the machine.
There is a rumor that we’ll all get computers soon to manage the database software. That would be pretty cool, but the space requirement in the office is going to be enormous, and my productivity is going to be sucked dry. I might buy a USB memory stick and run a dual boot system to have Linux at work if I need to sit in front of a computer all day.
While making the homework available to parents will make the students have even less of an excuse to miss assignments, I’m willing to bet it will make no impact on the students performance in class. It will waste my time, and be an automation that is actually more costly than good. Ultimately, it will need to take place, because the environment in the neighborhood is so competitive that it appears any school without online components is woefully out of date.
