this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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My first year teaching I was encouraged to do everything on the chromebooks, because the district wanted to save on printing costs.
If you have 100+ students, and are limited to 500 pages/month (I could print 500 more, but had to purchase my own paper…), you have to use the laptops.
Also, when parents and students increasingly treat attendance as a suggestion, keeping up with paper assignments is hellish. There were days I showed up with 1/3 or more of my class missing - with online class work, I at least could say “the work is available online.”
The technology is a problem, but it’s a problem that’s arisen because class sizes are out of control and admin has zero idea what is going on in the classroom. It’s a bandage that’s been left on so long the skin is starting to get infected around it.
What the fuck is it with schools being stingy with printed paper. At scale its less than a cent a sheet
They also have to be paying for the software that tracks how many prints you use. It’s fucking stupid, and it’s just one of a million little ways that they make sure to punish anyone stupid enough to teach.
I ended up buying my own printer. Printing alone got me to the maximum $300 of classroom expenses I was allowed to write off on taxes.
Unfortunately not only a problem in schools. Where I work at there's already a pay per use system that bills the department, with an entire system with separate codes to identify where you belong financially. Now they're debating adding a fee for the ability to print.
So you save 100 in taxes and pay 500 in printing costs... You're down 400 for supplying your employer. Lol
They’re pretty obviously supplying it for their students, not their employer. Weird as hell to rub someone’s nose in the fact their students are trapped in a school system that doesn’t even supply teachers with proper access to printed materials. Even Reddit used to run a donor program to help teachers out with the costs.
The way I read their comment was pointing out that the employer (the school district) should be providing sufficient printing. :shrug: But there's many ways to interpret, I suppose
It's like tipping... It happens because we let it. It's so incredibly common that literally poor teachers are paying for basic supplies the school doesn't when they should look those kids in the eyes and tell them they are sorry and that their society and school have failed them and to go home and tell their parents to vote differently.
Oh yeah, mate, that's gonna fix it.
Sure, you can do that once. Then you are out the job. Talking about politics will get you in more trouble than raping a kid.
I went into teaching because I care about making the world a better place. It cost me my marriage, it has sunk me into some of the deepest pits of despair that my mental health could take, it has meant physical and verbal abuse.
Buying pencils for kids is the kind of thing that you don’t mind too much, because at least it is a problem you can fix.
Once, I had a student ask me for a pencil. (He’d ask me everyday - usually in response to me asking why he wasn’t doing his work.) He looked me in the eye, snapped it in half, and asked for another.
I gave it to him. Who cares. I couldn’t fix the sinks which didn’t work and stunk because kids shoved shit into them, but I could fix the fucking pencil.
It’s a terrible job where you are expected to save the world and hated for everything you do. But, as a dog returns to his vomit... It’s part of my soul.
Anyone that would say that to a student who turned up to learn has no business teaching. You don’t take funding problems out on students. It’s not the teacher’s obligation to self fund their classroom, but many do it because often nobody else is. Reading someone talk about that and the message you decide is important to share with them is ‘lol you’re paying your employer’ is weirdo behavior.
They get indoctrinated with all kinds of other bullshit. They can take some truth home.
Also spent several hundred just on vinegar and baking soda for labs.
But yeah, I actually had to quit teaching after my divorce because I could no longer afford to do it!
So many donations and funds for schools are earmarked, you can only spend them in specific ways. If you spend them in ways that don't align with the earmark, it's incredibly easy for the donors or the state to claw them back. So that $40mil your local suburban school district spent on a new football stadium? That was likely earmarked SPECIFICALLY for football, they can't really just swish the money to better textbooks, or whatever. Same with tech funding - you get $250k to upgrade your school district with Chromebooks or whatever, you MUST buy within what the funding packet tells you you can buy, and you can't really do anything else with it.
That doesn't even get into the cartelization of textbooks and school software. There's so few real options that it's incredibly easy for these companies to collude without really looking like it's collusion.
Execs know teachers are doing it because of internal drive to teach and not for the pay and they take advantage of it in absolutely every way they can.
If teachers want useful posters on the wall, gotta pay for it. If teachers want students to not have to share a worksheet 3:1, teachers will pay for it. It's incredible not only how much they do for free, but how much they pay out of pocket for the "privilege"
Yeah. The system in the US works on exploiting, crushing, and discarding young teachers. Almost none of the other teachers I met while teaching are still in the profession. You are expected to martyr yourself for the job - I usually didn’t get to eat lunch, because I was busy. I stopped drinking water, because I ended up pissing myself one day when I couldn’t get to the restroom.
Teachers where I live are constantly asking for donations of basic school supplies, snacks, tissues, and cleaning supplies for classrooms. It is incredibly disheartening.
I'm old enough such that when I was at primary school (this is years 5-11 for non UKians) there was a computer. Not in every class, no. A computer, on a wheeled trolley that could be moved around. Well actually I think there were probably three. Because there were three floors and no-one was going to move that trolley up and down the stairs. But still it definitely was not one per class.
It was barely used. In fact, the teachers didn't really know HOW to use it. They actually just let me go at it, because I did know how to work it.
In secondary school (11-15/16), things were somewhat different in that there were slightly more modern computers, most classes had one and there was a dedicated room where there was a classroom number of computers available. This was where we were taught "ICT" which, was essentially showing how to use word processors and spreadsheet software. Again teachers of the time were quite far behind and I'm not exaggerating here, I used to help the teacher, teach this class. But there was no programming, or any advanced use. It was very basic tasks with specific software. All of our written work, even for this class was written with a pen, in an exercise book.
Now, budgets were still terrible. I can be pretty sure about this because I remember that because we DID still do everything on paper, photocopies were handed around the room. Oh they weren't any flash laser photocopy (well sometimes in secondary school it was). No, these was the kind with the fuzzy purple ink that was hand rolled to make a copy. But we got by.
Now, there's no doubt we live in a digital world and computing must be taught because we do everything on a phone or computer now and people need to know how to do it. But, there's still surely a good reason to be doing work in exercise books with a pen and paper? Everything cannot be on a computer.
I really don't understand why teachers need to pay for all of this...
Here in Germany (admittedly not at the forefront of digitalization) we just got to borrow school-supplied books. There were some exercise books we had to buy ourselves and at the end of the year we had to pay some 15€ for printing.
In the last three years we were allowed to bring our own laptops and tablets, which would save us the printing costs.
Other teaching material costs were always paid for by the school.
What about this does not work in the US of A?
because in the USA we hate teachers. it's really that stupid and simple. and we hate poor people even more than we hate teachers... and most public teachers are automatically poor people due to horrible wages.
teachers are now viewed as professionals worth of respect. they are seen as losers who failed at life and deserve to be punished and hated for it. they are seen as inherently lazy for choosing it as a profession. teachers are public servants, and public servants are all leeches on society.
it was this way growing up for me, and it's even worse today. and all our public policies and funding around education reflect this.
our society loves to go on about education, but in practice is essentially anti-education.
the last time the USA made public investments in education was post ww2, because of the Soviets. Then we rapidly clawed it all back during the 1980s and it's been in decline for 50 years now. we did that because we had an existential threat and were in competition with the Soviets. Once we 'won' we no longer had any need to care about education and we essentially have a two-tier system of seduction, one for the rich that is the best in the world, and one for everyone else that is on par developing nations.
If you come here and got to spend a day in a rich school vs a poor school, your mind would be blown. One will be doing amateur rocketry, and the other can't even do basic arithmetic or reading.
Not enough profit for the shareholders if the school is free. Also, how can they pay for the biggest military in the wolrd if they keep funding needless items like school lunches and resources.
To be fair, school lunches aren't free in Germany.
Technically they could be considered free if you factor in monthly child benefits (currently at 259€ per child) or parents further qualify for social assistance.
It still amazes me that laptops are still the cutting edge tech for schools.
General purpose computers have always had major problems with students getting distracted and going off topic, and are a never ending source of tech issues; particular when locked down in a way that still fails to address the previous issues, but makes them fail more often.
Admin is concerned about paper costs? Get every student an Eink reader. Schools are a big enough market to justify specoalized Eink readers that support classroom management style features (e.g. pushing a reading to student in the room).
Don't want to deal with hand written essays. I was using a digital typewriter as a middle school student 20 years ago.
It's like requing laptops for every math class because we don't want to force students to do all their calculations by hand. But that's not the choice: we have calculators! Even when we let them use calculators, we have a choice of what calculator to give them. We have 4 function calculators, scientific calculators, graphing calculators, symbolic calculators. And we can pick what tool we give students based on the needs of the particular lesson.
All of those are MORE expensive, at scale. If you can just hand 1500 kids a $200 Chromebook that fulfills ALL those functions, that's $300k, vs 1500 e-ink readers at $40 a pop, 1500 digital typewriters @ $100 apiece, etc. Hell, that scientific calculator ALONE might be $200+ in some markets because Texas Instruments practically has the market cornered (to the point that I had to go to the administration of my school district to show them that the Casio I had was functionally identical).
If I may ask, just how large are the classes today?
For reference, in 1980, my 10th grade English class (Mrs. Chase, she was awesome) had 36 students.
That was average for my school at the time.
The BIG classes like general US History (taught by Mr. Conway, who was wildly popular) had 40+ kids.
Mr Conway also kept a real honest to goodness stocks in his class room, so anyone that misbehaved had two options.. into the stocks for the class or off to the assistant Vice Prinicpal's office and spend a day in ISS. (in school suspension)
There would ALWAYS be one jackass Junior in each class that would opt for the stocks, at the start of every year and then NO one EVER caused a beef in Mr. Conway's classes - or really ANY of the government studies (US History, Civics, Social Studies) deparement classes.. Hearing about who chose the stocks and the rumors usually scared the underclassmen shitless, so they rarely ever piped up.. except for the really stupid smartasses that always tried to test how far they could go..
The most I dealt with was around 36. I had around 28 chairs.
However, the feeder middle school had class sizes of 60+. There were literal riots, with multiple teachers injured, that the district covered up.
Stocks would absolutely not be allowed. I had a student that spent fifteen minutes screaming and cussing me out, straight to my face in front of a principle. When she said “I wish I wasn’t in your class” and I said “me too” - I got in trouble. (She was mad because I wrote her up for literally just walking into my classroom to sell snacks. She didn’t attend classes, she just did whatever she wanted.)
This was a public school and they tolerated this shit?
Sweet Jesus the standards have fallen.
Is it the parents, school board and administration or a combination of all 3?
White flight and a state that hates education.
The rest of the science department were “emergency certified” - eg, random bachelors degrees.
I know for the fact the district has put teachers in without BACKGROUND CHECKS.
Holy shit. Lemme guess.. it's a southern state and in a majority black district?
Bingo.
First week of the job: “hey, stop talking about your college experiences with the kids. These kids are never going to college, so none of it will ever connect with them.”
Unbelievable…
The more I see about education nowadays, the more I realize I would not survive it anymore. So many tests and assignments and whatever, students have barely any time left to think or be bored. Everything gets constantly evaluated.
Trying to keep old stuff alive in a digital world is stupid. I do think that kids need to learn to think and research on their own, so AI and grammar and spelling corrections should be disallowed from the laptops and Chromebooks. Having an algorithm fix everything for you and write your papers is developmentally bad.
-old person
I disagree.
I tutored a college student who had dysgraphia. They originally had a calculator accommodation, but this was removed at the request of the instructor.
The student was in no way incapable of learning the material in the class - a remedial math course mostly on basic statistics and presenting data. But they were incapable of remembering most of the multiplication table.
There’s no reason to force a person to do long division by hand. The student was perfectly capable of understanding the process of calculating an average, but actually doing the problem meant that they were counting out by threes on their hand to do 3x7.
I’ve worked with dyslexic students on writing assignments - they are just as capable of intelligently responding to a writing prompt if you ask them verbally. Why should they be punished because they can’t spell (especially when we had like a decade of NOT TEACHING PHONICS)?
I draw a hard line at generative AI, but as long as the thoughts are theirs, I’ve never been concerned too much with students using tools to help them.
Your special needs student using a calculator has pretty much no bearing on this conversation.
Even for students without disabilities, a calculator removes the cognitive demand of the arithmetic. If I am teaching algebra, I want most of their cognition to be taken up by the algebra, not the arithmetic.
There are multiple such platforms - Canvas, ClassDojo, InfiniteCampus. Heck, you can even go with the free and open source Moodle. Most of these also integrate with useful online tools, like Desmos (graphing calculator) and PHeT (science simulations.)
This can help with workload, because you can often set up things like multiple choice quizzes that grade themselves (but how often should that be your primary way of assessing students?)
The problem is that some skills simply need to be learned with pen and paper. I have taught and tutored chemistry for years - balancing equations and stoichiometry are skills that you can’t really learn on a computer.
There’s also evidence that computer based notetaking is less effective - that students remember less.
That makes a lot of sense. I think there’s plenty of research to back up your claim about writing helping memory, too. I used to try to remember things better by (1) writing it down, (2) reading it aloud, (3) thinking about the next level up.
Number 3 is probably less useful outside fields where you’re constantly trying to “scale” systems… but in any case, it’s a thought experiment that happens to be really good at exposing the boundaries of concepts. Like… “okay, I built one server… now, what if I needed to manage a farm of 1000? What issues then become more pronounced?”
Out of curiosity, do any of these platforms try to marry itself with paper workflows? Maybe stuff like:
Canvas has a very neat “annotation” tool, where the teacher can upload a document and students can write on it and submit.
I also see a lot of canvas assignments where the answer is in an auto graded quiz, but the teacher has the students take a picture and upload to show their scratch work. This can be added as a “question” to the assignment.
There are good ways to use the tools for sure - I did really like that the auto graded quizzes on canvas could use randomized numbers. Eg, when I did speed/distance/time, I could write a word problem where it would randomize the quantities so each student got a unique quiz and couldn’t cheat.
Tools like PHeT/CK12/other simulation programs are also a godsend. Even working with college chemistry, being able to show visual representations of acid/base dissociation or how to balance an equation makes things so much easier.
The platforms are great - the work flow problems are more consequent to the way the school system is set up, especially in the Title 1 hell schools that are left to fall through the cracks.