I\u2019d mentioned periodically that my oldest son has started high school, though I can\u2019t remember if I\u2019ve griped, in this forum, about the fact that the freshmen class has iPads and the teachers are going overboard with using them, to the point that all class readings, and homework assignments, and pretty much everything, is found via an app on the iPad. \u00a0As we speak, he\u2019s struggling through an assignment where he seems to need to flip back and forth between the reading, the questions, and his own work answering those questions, instead of being able to have all these materials in front of him at the same time.<\/p>\n
And it looks like we\u2019re going to have a problem with biology, one of the two classes we had dared to place him in the honors-level class. \u00a0Our first issue \u2014 and we\u2019ll have have to talk to the teacher about this \u2014 is that the teacher thinks that, since she has said that she\u2019s available for questions off-hours, that it\u2019s equally OK for her to send out homework assignments after class has met, due the next class \u2014 so he got an e-mail Saturday at noon with an assignment due tomorrow. \u00a0Highly unprofessional!<\/p>\n
What\u2019s more, so far, the instruction has been very vague: \u00a0\u201cthink like a scientist!\u201d with questions that he can\u2019t make heads or tails of. \u00a0If you give him an assignment to read about the parts of a cell and answer questions on the content of that chapter, he\u2019d do fine. \u00a0But if this continues, if even biology is about verbal\/writing skills, he\u2019s doomed.<\/p>\n