To my teachers: you caught me.

This is being written on a home computer that is connected to the internet.

I do own a flash drive.

I do have a working printer.

The same could be said for most of the students at BV.

But guess what?

Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t.

Sorry that when I tried to turn in my hastily-written essay to turnitin.com at 11:59 p.m., in order to meet that midnight deadline, my computer crashed.

These things do happen.

Altering my grade on an assignment because my internet was down is unacceptable.

If I miss a day of class, I’m not going to be spending all my time refreshing School Center so I can learn what my assignment was and turn it in with the rest of the student body.

I’m going to be spending all day in bed…“sick.”

So when I come into school the next day and ask what we went over the day before, don’t glare at me.

Technology is not an educational crutch.

More and more of my math homework is assigned through MathXL.com

I guess I keep carrying that ten-pound book back and forth to class for nothing.

MathXL.com would be a brilliant tool. If only it served its purpose.

I’m sure it was designed to give teachers a clear sense of the type of problems their students were getting wrong.

In reality, it gives me the opportunity to finish my math homework in under five minutes, thanks to the handy-dandy ‘Help me solve this’ feature.

It even tells you when you have the right or wrong answer.

Thanks, MathXL.com. Now I’m never going to try in that class.

I do understand that the internet is an amazing resource, but relying on technology for education is sending the wrong message to students.

It isn’t showing that BV is moving forward with their process of learning.

All it shows is that we are taking the job that teachers should be doing and replacing it with websites.

If I fall asleep in class, then I shouldn’t be able to complete the homework.

Fact.

This is no longer the case, thanks to the technological elitism that BV is showing.

Just because a teacher can tell a student to go to the internet for help rather than teach something, doesn’t mean they should.

It is completely detrimental to education in the classroom.

If I have to do an assignment online, we can’t discuss it in class the next day.

Even the tools provided don’t replace face-to-face help from an instructor.

If a student wants to copy an essay off of the internet and turn it in, that is their problem.

They won’t be receiving the education that the rest of us will.