~The rise and fall of edu-tainment in my classroom~
I began my teaching career in the age of the Classroom Technology boom. All of my students had one-to-one MacBooks in 2013, and as a 1st year teacher, I really didn’t know what to do with these powerhouse pieces of technology every day. It makes sense. I graduated high school in the age of computer labs. No one was accessing that technology unless my teacher jumped onto the handwritten calendar to get her classes a slot for the right days and class periods. Even in college, we had communal computer labs, and if they were filled, they were filled. It wasn’t until my junior year when I finally put my voice recorder away, and pulled out my little Acer Aspire Netbook. You read that right, “netbook”. Yes, I am that old.
Either way, I was issued my MacBook Pro to help guide my 8th graders with their MacBooks through the 2013-2014 school year. I felt like we all caught on pretty quickly to the digital age. My student teaching had me keeping a handwritten teacher planner and physical notecards of the student standards. My actual job had me typing in shared documents that were shared through Dropbox. My students experienced the same shift. They went from knowing only how to open up the photo app (typical middle schoolers), to using iMovie flawlessly.
No wonder the years that followed became the next Space Race between me and my students. Except this time, no one was trying to defeat the Russians, it was teachers in classrooms trying to defeat the brain drain effect that technology had on our students. And sadly, we just couldn’t keep up. I have vivid memories of collaborating with other teachers trying to figure out how to “make it engaging!” More color! More movement! More gifs! (Gifs were big at the time. If you could use a good gif, you were smooth.)
For a while, this seemed to work. This was back when the smartphone had been out for some years but before student cell phones seriously became the bane of every teacher’s school existence. If we could just make our lessons poppin’ enough, we could hold their attention and maybe, maybe make the information sticky enough for them to retain and (holy upon holies) transfer it to real reading, writing, or, get ready for it, a test.
I feel like around 2019 is about when collectively teachers began to just give up. Nothing we did in a classroom could compare to the dopamine hit of watching Lil Yachty for 17 seconds on a phone. The bells and whistles didn’t work anymore. The days of my students saying at the end of a lesson, “Hey, I see what you did there! You tricked us into learning by making it fun.” were over. Regardless of whether the outcome was beneficial or the path to get there was less painful thanks to crafty planning on my part, my students were predominantly on “do not attempt” mode.
At that point, the game was clear. Once the direct teaching or review was over, it was the inevitable: “If we finish this, can we get on our phones?” I didn’t play that game very often, but I would also be lying if I said that when life got dicey, especially at the end of the year, I didn’t give in to temptation. For the most part though, I was okay with being “that” teacher. You know the one. The Still Making Us Do Work one.
Fast forward to 2025. Texas finally mandated that cell phone use during school instructional hours was prohibited. To my campus’s credit, they implemented this with fidelity. It was the biggest game-changer in my classroom as far as discipline goes. And yet, the attention spans were still far gone. The need to game on Chromebooks was stronger than ever. And here I was with the bells and whistles that I never really gave up on: the movement, the catchy hooks, the gamification. I kept all of this and more in the rotation even though I could see it was all falling flat. I suppose the mindset of making education as entertaining as possible never left -until it did.
There is nothing like a well-intentioned game of Blooket gone wrong to make you throw your teacher planner (yes, I still keep a physical one) on the ground and say, “To hell with it!” I stopped chasing novelty and Edu-tainment. And it’s been the most liberating and beneficial thing for my students lately.
Leave a Reply