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In addressing your question, I want to begin by dismissing that the problem is either bad parenting or lack of school funding. The fact is that some students with crappy parents at poorly funded schools are receiving good educations. And some kids with attentive parents and well funded schools are receiving educations that are of fecal quality.Yes, having a terrible home-life is a barrier to school success. As a child I never met my father, and was abandoned by my mother for a number of years. I was shuttled from school to school and spent years in special education classes at largely minority schools. But at the age 12 something remarkable happened. I was sent to a private Catholic school for 3 years (I repeated 6th grade). This was a very financially strapped school that likely had a per-pupil budget less than half that of a public school. But what it lacked in funding it made up for in sound educational philosophy.Most students who are receiving substandard education are doing so for reasons that cannot be blamed on poor parenting or on lack of funding. Here are the 5 realities on the ground that are a direct result of bad educational philosophy:I. We’ve given up on knowledge in public schools.Our education system has gone downhill because we’ve given up on knowledge. Specifically what’s been thrown away is a respect for the value of knowing things and transmitting that knowledge to the next generation.Built into our educational standards, our teaching practices, and the curriculum foisted upon college Education students is a prejudice against teaching children discrete facts.Since the 1910s, educational progressives have forced an “everything but knowledge” prejudice into the curriculum of American schools. The idea in the 1910s was “It really doesn’t matter what a student knows since he can just go to the library and look it up.” In the 2000s, that’s become “It doesn’t matter what a student knows because he can just go online and look it up.” Those promoting the anti-knowledge philosophy today act like this is a completely new and revolutionary idea, not an idea that’s been failing for close to a century. And to the degree that knowledge is tolerated within the school system, it’s certainly not the job of the teacher to provide that knowledge, as this poster illustrates.What the educational establishment directly opposes is teachers knowing things and transmitting that knowledge is not valuable. The only value comes from the teaching creating an environment where the student constructs that the knowledge from scratch.If you really think the second way of doing things is better, let me ask you a question. If you wanted to learn Brazilian Jujitsu, would you prefer to take a class from Royce Gracie……or would you rather go in the backyard with your cousin and construct your own knowledge of grappling?Now this anti knowledge educational establishment often tout such noble goals as critical thinking or problem solving.Here’s the problem with that, something the deans of progressive education could not have known when Woodrow Wilson was president. Neuroscience has been able to find no evidence that non-domain specific critical thinking exists. Every critical thinking task is an application of knowledge task. If you don’t have knowledge, you have nothing to think critically about. And you can forget about that whole “look it up on the -blank-” trope that’s floated around in one form or another for the last century. Without knowledge firmly embedded in long term storage in the brain, a person won’t know where to start looking up information or have any basis to know whether that information even makes sense. It takes knowledge for a person to even be aware of what they don’t know.One of the problems with that is that a lot of “professionals” educated in educational theory lack REAL KNOWLEDGE. Once I was talking to a colleague about the movie Pearl Harbor. My colleague, who as BA and MA degrees in education, admitted to not knowing what happened at Pearl Harbor. When I tried to explain it he asked, “Didn’t we drop the atom bomb on Pearl Harbor?” So at that point I felt obliged to explain the timeline of WWII. Then he asked me “Where do you get the picture of the little Japanese girl with her clothes burned off?” He was referring to a famous picture from Vietnam. In all honesty, this individual is far from being the most ignorant professional educator I’ve met.The two biggest challenges to the MOST IMPORTANT educational reform we could make are (a) the anti-knowledge educational establishment holds only it’s philosophical beliefs with a religious fervor. (2) If we went to a knowledge based curriculum, you’d have a lot of people with BA, MA and Ed.D degrees who lack even basic knowledge about history, science, literature and art. How can they pass on knowledge when they don’t have.The prejudice against the transmission of knowledge is directly harming the reading comprehension skills of children.Knowledge is absolutely essential for reading comprehension. For example, researchers gave a difficult reading passage to 2 groups of students: advanced readers and struggling readers. You’d expect the advanced readers to do better, but the reading passage was about baseball. The gifted kids weren’t baseball fans, but the kids with learning disabilities were fans of the game. In this case the struggling readers did decisively better than the Brainiacs. Why? Because their background knowledge to comprehend even a difficult reading passage. And without background knowledge, even gifted learners struggled. The fact that we’ve so dismissed knowledge creates a two tiered system. Middle and upper class kids are presented with knowledge out of school and succeed in school. Poor kids enter school without such knowledge and fall further behind.Our current system where knowledge is dismissed at “factoids” and “trivia” is directly harming our students.II. We’re ignoring a literacy crisis.We are facing a full blown literacy crisis in America. We can lay part of the blame on how we’ve taught reading in the past (as a high school teacher I have no idea how reading is being taught now). When I was earning my credential the only method taught was Whole Language, and most Whole Language experts completely rejected using phonics. When I took the required reading methods class 20 years ago, the instructor would roll her eyes whenever the PH-word was uttered in class. I became legally qualified to teach 1st grade without knowing how to teach a child how to read. I wasn’t alone.Mind you I spent thousands of dollars and thousands of hours earning my credential.Another part of that crisis was referenced in item 1. The system I’m part of is doing a pretty lousy job transmitting knowledge to students. Knowledge is absolutely essential for reading comprehension. For example, researchers gave a difficult reading passage to 2 groups of students: advanced readers and struggling readers. You’d expect the advanced readers to do better, but the reading passage was about baseball. The gifted kids weren’t baseball fans, but the kids with learning disabilities were fans of the game. In this case the struggling readers did decisively better than the Brainiacs. Why? Because their background knowledge to comprehend even a difficult reading passage. And without background knowledge, even gifted learners struggled. The fact that we’ve so dismissed knowledge creates a two tiered system. Middle and upper class kids are presented with knowledge out of school and succeed in school. Poor kids enter school without such knowledge and fall further behind.But there’s one challenge to literacy that is even more profound than the two previous things I mentioned. Kids aren’t reading because they have grown unaccustomed to reading…at least passages of any length or difficulty. As recently as a few years ago, there were students (mostly girls) who brought novels with them to class. When they were done with their assignments they would take out a book and start reading. I haven’t seen that in a couple years. Instead, I’ve got students who want to know if they can go on their phones when they’ve finished their assignment. That brings me to the next item.III. Most students are distracted by electronics.Smart phones are ubiquitous on campus and they’re having a negative effect on student learning. I’m in my fifties, and I imagine that quite a few readers are too. Imagine going to school every day with your entire record collection in your pocket, with your favorite toys, with your favorite games, with a pocket TV that has access to your favorite movies and TV shows, with a device that allowed you to pass notes undetected, with a device that allowed you to cheat on tests and assignments. Smart phones are all that and more. And they’re also highly addictive.According to CNN, smart phones are distracting adults to the point of being a hazard.A study of pedestrians in midtown Manhattan found that 42% of those who entered traffic during a "Don't Walk" signal were talking on a cell phone, wearing headphones or looking down at an electronic device.Adults are walking out into traffic because their attention is glued to their phones. It’s even worse for kids. In a letter sent to Apple by managers holding $2 billion in Apple stock including California’s retirement plan, it was pointed out that these devices are too addictive to be responsibly used by unsupervised minors.The average American teenager who uses a smart phone receives her first phone at age 10 and spends over 4.5 hours a day on it (excluding texting and talking). 78% of teens check their phones at least hourly and 50% report feeling ‘addicted’ to their phones. It would defy common sense to argue that this level of usage, by children whose brains are still developing, is not having at least some impact, or that the maker of such a powerful product has no role to play in helping parents to ensure it is being used optimally. It is also no secret that social media sites and applications for which the iPhone and iPad are a primary gateway are usually designed to be as addictive and time-consuming as possible, as many of their original creators have publicly acknowledged.So kids are coming to school with devices so addictive that they stare at them for more than 4 hours a day. Under the best of circumstances, these devices are distracting. But in many cases the student is so desperate to get a hit of smart phone that they ask for frequent bathroom passes so they can get out of the classroom and text. Every teacher I know has stories about students they’ve caught using smart phones to cheat on tests or assignments, multiple stories.A colleague of mine recently conducted and experiment. She had every student turn off the vibrate on their phones, set the volume at full, and set them on the table. Every time the phone issued a notification , the student had to place a mark on the white board under the correct category.She sent me a photo of the results for 2nd period.It would be easy to say that this represents the typical level of distraction for an hour with a class of 38 students, but that’s not quite true. This experiment didn’t factor in the distraction from videos, music and games.IV. We’ve thrown discipline out the window.Last week, a colleague and I were heading back to his room to work on a lab when we noticed a young man hanging out in an area where he didn’t belong. We asked the young man where he was supposed to be and he made disrespectful comment that ensured we would need to talk to him. During the course of a 5 minute interaction he repeatedly refused to identify himself and directed profanity at us. I stayed with the kid and my colleague went to get security. When security arrived he called my colleague a “f***ing rat.” Here’s the thing I want to make clear. At no point did I or my colleague lose our cool or raise our voices. We remained calm and professional while this kid fired profanity at us. And the kid himself didn’t lose his cool either. He seemed to be enjoying the fact that he could direct profanity at an adult without fear of consequence. And sure enough, there was no real consequence.Our politicians have thrown discipline out the window. Literally. There is nothing more corrosive to the learning atmosphere than defiance. Defiance is when a teacher gives a direction and the student refuses.Teacher: “Johnny will you please take your assigned seat.”Johnny: “No. I want to sit here.”Teacher: “You don’t sit there. You need to go back to your assigned seat.”Johnny: “I don’t f***ing like that seat.”Exchanges like that happen every day in American classrooms, usually it’s a lot more extreme than that and profanity is frequently more colorful than what is described in the imaginary exchange above. All too often, it escalates beyond crude language.There’s been a left-of-center driven war on school discipline since well before I started teaching 20+ years ago. Over the last decade the so called “school-to-prison pipeline” has become the buzzword du-jour of those who think teachers need to put up with bullying and defiance. Some how holding kids accountable for their behavior is pushing them towards prison. My personal belief is that the pipeline to prison runs through uncorrected poor impulse control, and nothing we’re doing in schools today helps with that.If you have any common sense at all it makes sense that a kid who’s gotten in the habit of defying teachers, disrupting class, and damaging school facilities is already heading down the path of self destruction.While I feel sorry for the young delinquents that are allowed to matriculate without developing impulse control, I’m really worried about the potential danger these policies represent for students and school faculty. Andrew Pollack, who lost his daughter at the Parkland High School massacre has done extensive research into how district enabled Nikolas Cruz to repeatedly disrupt and defy teachers and ruin the learning environment for fellow students. Here’s what Mr. Pollack learned about Cruz’s 7th grade behavior:Sept. 3: While reviewing [a] homophones worksheet, when another student mentioned the amendment that talks about ‘the right to bear arms’ Nick [sic] lit up when hearing the word that related to guns and shouted out “you mean like guns!” he was overly excited thinking that we were going to talk about guns. Nick later used his pencil as a gun … shooting around the classroom.Sept. 4: Nick drew naked stick figures (showing body parts, sexual) and drew pictures of people shooting each other with guns.Sept. 11: After discussing and lecturing about the Civil War in America Nick became fixated on the death and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He asked inappropriate questions and was making shooting actions with his pencil. Some questions he asked were “What did it sound like when Lincoln was shot? Did it go pop pop or pop pop pop really fast? Was there blood everywhere? After the war what did they do with all the bodies? Did people eat them?”Sept. 16: When we began to read the Odyssey Nick paid partial attention (in-and-out) until we came up to the gruesome scene when the giant eats Odysseus’ crew members, only then Nick was interested in the lesson and got my 100% attention.Sept. 27: Another student also informed me (once Nick was escorted out of class) that Nick asks him all of the time “How am I still at this school?”Oct. 1: When talking about figurative language and onomatopoeias, Nick shouted out “Like a gun shooting.” Nick will find any excuse to bring up shooting guns or violence … He got frustrated and said “I hate security, I hope they die.” Then he stated to me, “F- -k you.” I called security to pick him up immediately.Oct. 15: Spoke to his mother … We discussed that he should not be playing violent video games and that he should be put in a different school that can help with his behavior and emotional issues. We also discussed his obsession with guns/violence. She stated that he is interested in buying a BB gun from Walmart and was asking his mom, repeatedly, if he could get the gun, promising that he would “just shoot at trees.”Oct. 17: Nick began reading the last couple of pages out to the students, intentionally trying to ruin the book for everyone else. I asked him to stop and he told me that he dislikes the book and then he stated, “I like guns” can we talk about that. Then he continued to read the book out loud again.We can see the pattern of behavior that Nikolas Cruz exhibited. This kind of behavior is not surprising to me. I’ve seen similar behavior as both a middle-school and high school teacher.Now here’s the BIG LIE the anti-discipline “reformers” are telling the public.“We’re just replacing suspension with other tools.”So what tools are they talking about. Let’s go back to how Parkland handled Nikolas Cruz, specifically what were the “tools” they used aside from punishment.On Nov. 4, after two months of gathering “data” for Cruz’s “Functional Behavior Assessment,” teachers were sent his “Positive Behavior Intervention Plan.” The plan included helpful tips, like:If Nikolas destroys property at a lower level,Calmly let him know he has not followed one of the expectations. Remind him what he is working for.Prompt him to use a cool down pass and walk away to diffuse [sic] the situation.If Nikolas engages in major disruption/property destruction:Let Nikolas know, “you’re getting too loud. I need for you to get back into control by using a cool down pass or calming down at your desk. If you get back into control, you can stay in class. If you continue, I’ll need for you leave [sic].”Walk away and do not pay attention to his behavior.Do not argue with Nikolas or engage with him.When class is over, Nikolas needs to go to his next class and behavior plan should re-set with able to [sic] earn reward breaks again.So the “tools” were basically to allow Cruz to be a jerk to the teachers and to the other students, with mild warnings. The teachers were told to ignore his misbehavior and not engage. These are only tools if you consider ignoring your car’s check engine light to be a tool of auto maintenance.We all know how well that worked out.As a teacher working in the system, the only additional “tools” I see being used are processes that allow students to get away with their misbehavior until the problem can be passed on to someone else.V. We’re ignoring the fact that there is a crisis facing boys.It’s no secret that a lot of boys hate school, and it starts early. At the age when children start kindergarten, boys are a good 1 to 1.5 years less emotionally and mentally developed than females. This has always been the case, but the consequences are more profound.As progressive educational policies have put American students further and further behind, educational leaders have decided to front load more math and language arts into earlier years. Where kindergarten used to be about colors and farm animals and lining up in a straight line, now students are learning math and reading in kindergarten classes. Kindergarten today has become what 1st grade was when I started teaching. And that is developmentally inappropriate for boys. Predictably, they’re acting up.So we’re taking 4 and 5 year old boys and trying to make them do what 1st graders did 20 years ago, and they can’t focus. Sometimes they misbehave because what we’re asking them to do is developmentally inappropriate. So then what happens?We put them on drugs because they’re acting like little boys being asked to behave in ways boys were not meant to behave. The fact is that in many ways, the schools have made being a boy against the rules.Let me begin with this picture.Above you see a picture of 2 dogs roughhousing. When he was young, my now 9-year-old yellow lab loved to play that way with his best friend, a dog that lived a few blocks over. Sometimes the growling was quite loud and even got carried away. But these two dogs have continued to display genuine affection for each other for 9+ years. And my lab was never better behaved than after a nice long roughhousing session with his best friend.Little boys are a lot like young dogs.They need to roughhouse and burn off energy and it helps define relationships. Doing so makes it easier for them to behave themselves during those times when they need to sit still and do something boring. I would go so far to say that rough-and-tumble play is a biological necessity for young boys.So when I did a search using the terms “student roughhousing” the first entry that came up reflects America’s school system’s view of rough-and-tumble play.And the anti-roughhousing prejudice is also directed at parents.The things about roughhousing with boys is that it usually works out for the better. Guys who get into school yard fights often end up being close friends afterwards. This isn’t limited to humans. Primatologists observing apes in the wild show that adolescent male chimps who physically fight are usually better friends after, and a frequently seen grooming each other within hours of the altercation.When I went to high school in the early 80s, we had a basketball coach who, if he saw that 2 boys had a beef, would make them lace up the gloves and do a few rounds.In every case, a few controlled rounds turned enemies into friends. Now, the teacher who made 2 boys box each other would lose his credential. After all, nothing is worse than violence.But there is a tendency in education to believe there are no biological differences between boys and girls, and that the male desire to whack and wrestle is a result of socialization. And if we somehow socialize boys to want to whack and wrestle, then we can socialize them to want to not roughhouse. The expectation is that through proper socialization, we can make little boys act like good little girls.Our curriculum is just as geared towards girls as our behavior standards. Right now we’re starting 5 year old in academic study, even though it’s developmentally inappropriate to have 5 year old boys learning math and reading. And God forbid a boy a reads a story about sword fighting or writes a story about trench warfare. He’s likely to be sent to a school psychologist and told to read Amilia Bedelia. So it’s no wonder that too many boys come to hate school and lose interest before high school.

Teaching is about motivation, the ability to invigorate the curiosity of the learner, to incite the will to progress and ask questions and seek answers. A good English teacher will foster an environment where students are not afraid or self-conscious of their initially clumsy handle on the material. Being an effective teacher of English isn't about taking vocabulary and grammar and putting it into the student's head. There are an endless number of websites and books ripe with content to sate the student's appetite for knowledge. The English teacher's responsibility is to motivate the student to seek that supplementary knowledge on their own. Let us be clear with our motivation: the cultivation of actual English speaking students, not just someone who can pass a test. I've seen good English teachers, great English teachers, and downright bad English teachers.Let's start with the bad:There was a guy I worked with who did not care. He was a disciplinarian. No one was to step out of line in his classroom. He started the class with a 15 minute lecture (more a tirade) about acting out, shouting without raising a hand, and not maintaining attention. He kept order with fear.He gave English worksheets and let the students go at it for 45 minutes. He gave vocabulary drills without reinforcing through context. He taught straight out of the books, reading in a monotone. The guy could have had a rewarding career in drug-free anesthesiology. He did not bother to learn student names, nor become acquainted with their learning styles or abilities. Students more or less passed the multiple choice tests, and floundered through the oral ones.Anyone who thinks the job of a teacher is to force feed knowledge and inflict strict disciplinary actions at the expense of free and intelligent discourse, is in the wrong field.The good:There was a teacher who had good chemistry with his students. He was well-liked and for the most part could make it through a lesson, with a review at the end, allowing the students to parrot the material just acquired. He let them test drive the material through small group activities, moving up to partnered conversation activities, and then finally to solo composition. They would learn through song and dance and the occasional inventive game of chance prompting vocabulary and the target language. He would know the audience, find the high performers and pair them with underperformers to foster communication and motivate. He utilized his gifts with art to enchant and entertain the students with hand-made comics written in English. He made card games with custom material that engaged the students. There was rarely a class that went sour through lack of interest or boredom.He motivated many students, and by the end of the curriculum, they had retained a good deal of what they were taught.Mission accomplished, right?The great:I worked with an English teacher who was an amateur wrestler in his free time. He was an absolute rock star who understood showmanship in and out. He spoke English fluently, despite never stepping foot in an English-speaking country. He knew how to learn. And man, did he know how to teach.The man was a mammoth, very tall for his nationality, muscles bulging out of his polo shirt. I was bodybuilding at the time, so the sight of the both of us at the front of the classroom was enough to snare the attention of even the most rowdy of pupils. We had great rapport between us, which made our English skits that much more interesting. We sang, we joked, we danced, we played games and got the students involved- all in English.He was not afraid to make fun of himself, and even used his shortcomings to get down to the level if the students and speak to them as equals. Often in the spotlight was his thinning hair and bachelor status. He told stories to give context to English language targets of the day.This teacher had students not only make their own humorous compositions, but to allow others to read and laugh at their compositions. He understood the effectiveness of being entertained, of laughter, and the rewarding feeling of inciting joy in another person using a new language. He instilled confidence in them, and made them look forward to his classes.One may think that this is all merely on the periphery of, or indeed even impeding the real goal: to teach English. But anyone who saw the students pound their desk with laughter, would also be very surprised to see them immediately after take to their books and furiously write notes, every one of them with a smile on their face.At the end of the day, everyone was surprised to see this teacher's students ace not only the written tests, but the more natural oral ones. He was criticized for his methods, but no one could argue with his results. The guy was a goddamned rock star.An effective English teacher inspires further learning. Anything that happens in the classroom serves as the basis for that. The students of the bad teacher will grow up hating English, associating it with fear and anxiety. The students of the good teacher will develop positive associations with it, and perhaps look fondly at their time in the classroom. The students of the great teacher? Well, you can ask them for yourself, as they will most likely be able to respond to you in English.

While I certainly agree with those who think (nay, "believe" may be a better word for some tech evangelists) the new tech reading devices are more convenient, I am agnostic with respect to their essential VALUE and critical of the outsized impact of their negative aspects.Firstly, let me tell you about me, then I will give my list of pros and cons.I am a tech-savvy educator. I was always the first in my school district to implement new technologies into my teaching and lessons. Only once, when a teacher beat me to the punch in using hand-held quizzing devices, has anyone in my district ever had something before I had already been "piloting" it in my classroom (high school & college biological sciences and environmental sciences).I personally own 2 Kindles, 3 iPads, 3 versions of the iPhone, multiple Mac & PC computers (Mac much preferred) with Mac OS9, OSX, WinXp, Win7, and a couple flavors of LINUX, several "off-brand" reading/text devices that never survived in the marketplace, graphing calculators, and other gadgets that have come and gone with the tide of fashion. ThereIn the classroom:I installed my own wireless network so students could bring their own devices and share data, files, and bandwidth with me,I used LCD screens and an overhead to project computer screens, then LED projectors, then digital computer projectors, then a blend of digital projectors and electronic whiteboard (SMART) with tablet-sized controllers, digital ink pads (Qomo), and drawing tablets (WACOM)I used digital data acquisition software and hardware (i.e. "probeware") from Vernier and PascoI set up a special GoogleDocs (before GoogleDrive was the name) account before Google made educational accounts available, had a classroom DropBox account, and used electronic distribution of reading materials and submissions of homework possible.My classes used physical texts, electronic texts (minimal, since the cost was prohibitive) and digital copies (PDF) of many, many articles from newspapers (especially NYTimes Science Tuesdays), popular science journals, and some professional science journals.Now, as I say, I am no enemy of technology and readily embrace it for my own use and in my own learning. As a skilled adult learner, I know which media best suits my preferences and proclivities as I seek to come to understand new concepts and experience new ideas.However, my students generally did not and do not have these metacognitive skills, nor have they developed or owned the disciplines needed to be able to evaluate their own learning much beyond the ability to predict whether they might pass today's quiz.Because of that issue: the lack of student self-awareness of learning and metacognition and their general lack of "expert learner" discipline, I rarely relied on electronic devices to provide significant amounts of information, but rather used them as tools for data acquisition and then tools for analyzing, displaying, and discussing the data. Most "big" information on major course concepts came from reading the physical text and re-interpretation and extension by me, as the teacher, and in group discussions. Ancillary information, current events (involving the concepts), and relevant examples of the concept came through guided readings of articles (sources mentioned earlier) and self-directed "research" of information via the Web with general guidelines and suggested search topics provided.25+ years of classroom teaching showed me that my students were just like those used in many studies of how student approach different text media. They essentially "scanned" or "skimmed" electronic media and interacted more deeply with physically printed text--if they read anything at all. Simply making the lessons more "tech-oriented" pleased the students for the first lesson or so, but once they realized they still had to develop the skills to learn the material and to integrate it into what they already knew, they came to find the new tech gadgets (first, a limited number of shared desktop computers, then a lab set of laptops, then multiple lab sets of notebook computers, and eventually individual student "netbooks") as just another "text book." The newness wore off in days. Retention of electronic media readings was lower than that of reading the physical text. I even ported my Bio-1 text to an electronic form (PDF) and assigned the same chapters. Kids just "skimmed" the electronic forms --just as they had been taught to do by the design and implementation of the billions of World Wide Web pages!So, I ask this: For k-12 students in the USA, is it any more convenient for them to own electronic copies of their textbooks on a single device (say, a Kindle or iPad) if they are NOT going to read the texts or are only going to skim them anyway?I say no.Because of the way that publishing companies have expertly set themselves up as the arbiters of curriculum in the USA, by virtue of also being the ones who oversee the writing of many of the the US States' End of Course Assessments (ECA) and of the entire Common Core (CCSS) Assessments, they effectively control what is included the textbooks and can demand whatever they want for remuneration. In my state, at least (IN), the cost of the intro biology text is as much as 6 times the cost of the same physically printed textbook. There is NO cost incentive in the long-term. There is usually an insignificant savings in the short-term.Now to other matters more practical and immediate to the teacher and student.As someone already has stated, no textbook has ever run out of power, had a dead battery, or required a special adapter for its use. ALL of these happen -- and in any school, they happen every day! This issue has an impact on the student, the teacher, classmates, and the IT department. It steals time and other precious resources (people and educational $$). The lower the grade level, the more the teacher will have to intervene--and disrupt their lesson flow and classroom time management. It is largely a non-issue with physical textbooks.If someone "forgets" their single reading device, or it is lost, stolen, damaged, or otherwise incapacitated through an Act of God (I had a student say: "My dog ate my netbook"!), ALL of their customized material is out for the day. Some of my students took advantage of this loophole in technology curation and "forgot" their netbooks regularly. Since their netbook was personalized for their set of classes before school had started, a simple "loaner" netbook would not d0--unless it had everything in every course that any student might possibly be taking that semester. Our IT folks couldn't/wouldn't do that, so "forgetful" students, or students who suffered a loss, often missed a day or more of lessons until something could be specifically set up for them. In addition, the number of loaner netbooks was necessarily small due to expense and maintenance. The number of spare computers also shrank throughout the year as loaners were brought into full-time service to replace broken, lost, or stolen computers. These are not a trivial issue in a typical school with more than 100 students. ...And Yes, Our students were on the hook to pay for lost, broken, and stolen computers. They were offered insurance at the beginning of the year at a nominal cost. This factor did not improve results. What happened is that more than a few students had parents that simply refused to pay up when their child lost or broke a computer and in the inimitable wisdom of the admin & IT folks, that student was no longer allowed to have a computer (until the parents paid the bill).The reliance primarily on keyboard input removes a thought-flowing physical act we know as handwriting. We know from research that marking up a paper with a pen & highlighter does something different in the brain than performing the same acts with a keyboard (Kindle) or even with a stylus (iPad or Tablet). While we are not yet sure of the longer-term consequences, we know that physically marking a physical text results in better memory (immediate, short-term, and for several days) of the process and the reasoning behind the markings than the electronic form of marking.Do I find "pros" with tech gadgets in the classroom?When they are used for things that only the tech gadgets can do better than previous technologies and can aid the teacher in helping the students gain knowledge, analytic skills, and to develop better self-awareness of their own learning.To that end, using an iPad as a simple reading device is, I think, a mistake. Using it to collect, display, and aid in analysis of data is a wonderful use! Using the iPad, then, to write a communication to explain what the student did and why they did it increases its usefulness. THEN--using it to browse the web to find an article in a journal that supports the student's conclusions and constructing a presentation (individual or group) that reviews the article as it applies to the recent student work has very good value.As a way to re-do worksheets and make them more "appy," or to be the receptacle of the textbook...>>Phhbbbbbbttt!!<<(For those who do not recognize that last outburst - it is a "raspberry" and a display of derision.)There is more that can be said, but I bow to the constraints of time and Quoran space.