iRelle

I’ve just spent a few days working solidly on an assignment that proved to be rather more difficult to work with than I anticipated. I was supposed to just build on an existing unit plan and everything would be hunky-dory. A few re-writes, a few late nights and a lot of feeling-like-my-brain-has-turned-into-vanilla-pudding later, I’ve finally finished… Now all I have to do is trek out to the uni to hand it in. This is rapidly becoming one of my pet peeves this year.

The people starting first year education this year are met with a whole new policy about assignments. They submit every assignment online, where presumably it is marked digitally and emailed back to them. No reams of paper, litres of ink and packets of staples being used for a few weeks then either thrown away or stacked in the back of a cupboard somewhere, never to be looked at again. Unless you wanted to look back at an old assignment, of course. Then you can never find the one you want. Additionally, the markers’ handwriting is almost invariably hard to read. All these problems are solved by submitting assignments electronically. So why aren’t we doing it?

The line university lecturers are feeding us is that, since we’re in our final year, we don’t have to worry about adapting our ways. Not that we’ve never submitted assignments online before. We have done so on numerous occasions. Only one of those was ever marked digitally and emailed back, though. The rest the lecturers printed out and either mailed or handed back to us. This makes me think that it’s not so much the students’ reluctance to submit assignments electronically, but the lecturers putting off the changes as much as possible. They have to adapt and learn a new way of marking – and they’re a bit stuck in their ways.

I think this is an excellent example to be setting pre-service teachers (hey, you don’t have to learn something new now, you’re in your final year! Just kick back and enjoy the ride to graduation. Oh, yeah, when you’re a teacher you have to adapt and learn things sometimes, but since *I* don’t want to learn how to do this, just don’t worry about it). But it also reflects the attitudes of some teachers in schools, which is a bit scary. I’ve met teachers who rigidly resist digital reporting, digital whiteboards and writing on the computer without doing a written draft.

The times they are a-changin’. Time for teachers to change too.

(p.s. I also don’t want to go into uni today to submit this assignment.)

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