At 4:15 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon, Randle Deramus kicked back in a library chair and admitted something many parents are loathe to state in front of their children:“I don’t know anything about this, what he’s doing right now.”
His son Marcus, an 11-year-old sixth grader at Wellborn Middle School, had an assignment for which he needed the Internet to research inventors from the 1870s. The Deramuses have a computer at home – as do many families – but they don’t have the Internet access so many assignments call for these days.
So Deramus, after getting off work and almost reaching home, took his son to the Anniston Public Library for some ’Net time. And he watched. And waited.
“A lot of parents do this,” he said, referring to the down time in a library while their children use computers for projects their generation turned to the encyclopedia for. “I guess I could have put the Internet on at home, but he’d need to have someone else help him.”
The area’s technology teachers say they’re keenly aware of the differences between students who have computers and Internet access at home and those who don’t. Most computer classes don’t have homework because teachers don’t want to penalize students without a home computer. Teachers often volunteer to stay after school if a student needs to use the school’s computer lab. And, at times, they remind themselves that while 85 percent of their students have a computer, 15 percent don’t.
Teachers and others in higher academia and health care studying the impact of the home-computing boom are wondering if those differences impact how students learn?
Research is just now being gathered on the value of structured computer classes at the middle school or upper elementary years as part of a child’s overall education. National studies are also underway to see if there’s a link between regular computer use at the pre-school and kindergarten age and attention deficit, social and behavior problems, vision problems and a likelihood of obesity in later childhood.
Students who have computers at home are more savvy about surfing the Internet, teachers say, and the ones who don’t have computers are easy to spot.
“So many of them, it’s second nature almost by second grade,” said Cathy Clifton, who teaches technology and computing at Saks High School. “Some things, you can just tell who has a computer at home and who’s used to being on them.”
Because computers are so common, and so user-friendly (a term inspired by the computing boom), it doesn’t take much for students to catch up to their peers or succeed at basic computing courses, students say. Middle and high schools now have scheduled time for computer use during classes, students say, and that can be augmented by time at the library.
No, they aren’t spending the estimated three hours a night some researchers say teen-agers are on computers to do everything from research to games to chatting, but they get the job done.
“It’s not that hard,” said Lashunda McRath, an Anniston Middle School student at the library for an assignment on Mexico. “It’s real easy. I might spend an hour here.”
She and her cousin, Maquita McRath, say not having a computer at home means they have to go to the library, but that’s not a real hardship.
“This is the first place they told us to come if we didn’t have one at home,” Maquita McRath said. “You can usually get a computer here.”
By 4:30 p.m. the research tables at the library are almost full with students clicking and dragging. A few parents read magazines or perused the shelves while their children worked. Some even wondered aloud if books get used at all anymore.
They do, teachers say, but for some fields, the most current information is available online.
For example, some scientific and environmental issues change so fast, the Internet always outpaces a textbook, said Sharon Padgett, a technology teacher at Pleasant Valley High School. Some history topics are also easily researched by the computer, and current events classes draw heavily from the Internet.
“Most classes still use textbooks, but some are old, so out-of-date, it wouldn’t matter if you had a textbook,” she said. “The only place they can get current information is by the Internet.”
She said the first independent use for computers comes around seventh grade, when reports and projects go from pencil and paper to keyboard and screen. Using computers gives the teachers a new way to present the same material, Padgett said. And for this generation of students, accustomed to something new almost every three seconds, that’s important.
Because of the emphasis the state has put on computers, schools try to keep their ratio of computers to students as low as possible. Pleasant Valley has about one computer for every six students, Padgett said. That means it’s fairly easy for a student to get computer time if they need to.
Clifton said students who don’t have a home computer or Internet hookup may be at a disadvantage, but it’s usually just from the point of managing their time. They know computer-related projects or reports must be done during school hours or they’ll have to make arrangements with friends or another computer source to do the work.
In that instance, parents say, not having a computer at home teaches them to prioritize their work.
“We don’t have one, so he has to tell me when we need to come down,” Deramus said. “This is the second time we’ve done this this year, but it won’t be a big deal. It’s actually more convenient to come down here.”
That might seem at odds with the thoughts of most working parents, but the library set says listen. Not having a computer and Internet at home takes away some of the battles other households endure: There’s no fight over how long a child can spend on the Internet if there is no Internet. The phone line isn’t tied up, and the computer doesn’t stand in as a surrogate brother, sister or confidante. Traditional forms of homework, such as reading, math and spelling, get the needed attention, and those are things computer-illiterate parents can help with.
“I don’t know anything about computers,” Deramus said as a librarian helped Marcus find what he needed. “What she’s doing right there, I couldn’t start to do, so here we are.”
