“OK Google, Make Middle School Suck Even More!”
One father’s descent into seventh grade Chromebook Hell
Ever wish you could go back and relive seventh grade – that magical nine months of puberty, pimples, and soul-crushing insecurity? Of course not. A double root canal sounds more fun. But I think most of us retain at least a kernel of morbid curiosity about middle school – like subconsciously rubbernecking at some ghastly jackknifed Clearasil truck – wondering how insufferable it is now. Well lucky for you, I took one for the team a few months back – spending two days as a fly on the wall in a typical metro-American middle school. And guess what? It’s way worse than you remember, and if forced to finger just one culprit, it’s not the smartphones; it’s the stupid-awful Google Chromebooks.
If you’re a visual learner who' s short on time, simply refer to the image at the top of this page for my at-a-glance (and only mildly hyperbolic) Photoshop mashup of what I witnessed. But for the whole sordid tale, read on – if you dare!
For those who haven’t seen it, the Hulu comedy PEN15 is a hilariously brilliant portrayal of the mortifying slog that is American middle school. Set in Y2K Anytown USA, the show was shot on location at a classically telegenic 1930s junior high in North Hollywood – the very same public school my son now attends.
A few weeks into seventh grade, my son began complaining that many of his supposedly honors-level classes were so chaotic, he couldn’t follow the lessons. Lousy, non-helicoptering dad that I am, I initially brushed off his grousing, thinking, “Yeah, that’s called ‘seventh grade’ buddy.” Besides, at his age I was an annoyingly disruptive class clown myself, so who was I to judge? (One of my recurring schticks in Mr. Orr’s 1984 Social Studies class involved cutting all the animal buttholes out of photos in old National Geographics. That bit killed.) Yeah so anyway, maybe my son was being more like his mom, a gorgeous hardcore academic all-star Yalie who probably started requesting extra homework in pre-school. So some kids in his classes were goofing around. Big deal.
But as my son’s protests quickly grew louder and more insistent over dinner each night, I decided to see for myself whether things were really as bad as all that by taking advantage of the school’s policy permitting parents to observe classes. I didn’t particularly want to. I bristled at the thought of placing myself adjacent to those parents. Because where I live, for every genuinely selfless, wonderful parent school volunteer, there’s also one of those parents — a narcissistic busybody with more opinions than skills and whose on-campus omnipresence is less about communal altruism than their own pathological compulsion to stay in constant smothering proximity to their precious little screen zombies. Ahem. But how do I really feel?
“Girls and boys alike brazenly played web games with the sound on – from Tetris and Bejeweled knockoffs to multiplayer basketball and first-person shooter murder orgies – filling the room with an almost casino-like ambient symphony of bloops, bleeps, and muffled explosions.”
In the preceding year, energized by Jonathan Haidt’s best-seller “The Anxious Generation”, my wife and I had attended multiple meetings to urge the school to ban phones. And thankfully, just weeks before my two-day recon mission, the LA Unified Board of Education did indeed vote to ban smartphones from its 1000+ campuses. But enforcement of the policy hadn’t begun yet, so I presumed that phones were to blame for my son’s complaints, and fully expected to witness kids sneaking iPhone dopamine hits when teachers’ backs were turned. And yes, I did see that. What I didn’t expect was that phones would only comprise but a dainty sliver of a grotesquely enormous distraction pie; the overwhelming majority of classroom chaos was borne of the school-issued Google Chromebooks sitting on each and every desk.
Before showing up at school, I had suited up in my blandest business beige to be as inconspicuous as possible – and advised my son to pretend he didn’t know me, lest any cretinous puberteens hassle him about it afterwards. (That was quaint of me; as if any Gen-Z kids perceive hovering parents as remotely notable or worthy of derision!) The school’s front office sternly explained that I must wear a large neon visitor badge, enter each classroom before the bell, sit only in the rear, and remain silent. I was not to photograph or record anything, or use personal electronic devices of any kind – which was pretty rich given how every classroom looked like a Costco electronics department. Slipping quietly into each class, I attracted a few curious glances from students, but went largely ignored. I’m tall, and from my perch in the rear, I (unlike the teachers) enjoyed commanding views of every screen in the room.
What I observed in class after class over two days was that while Chromebooks were in near-constant use atop students’ desks, vanishingly little on-screen activity was academic. Wholly unspooked by the nosey, rizzless dad a few feet behind them, slack-jawed girls with Hot Cheetos-stained fingers lazily browsed clothes on Amazon, while caterpillar-mustached boys doomscrolled pro sports scores and sneakers. On nearly every screen in the room, YouTube’s telltale red logo winked from atop at least one Chrome tab – if not three or four – streaming a continuous bounty of intellectual enrichment: Minecraft and Fortnite walkthroughs, smokey eye makeup tutorials, Marvel movie trailers, Jackass scrotal trauma clips, and a veritable firehose of vacuous short-form brainrot cross-posted from a little Chinese cyberweapon called TikTok.
Girls and boys alike brazenly played web games with the sound on – from Tetris and Bejeweled knockoffs to multiplayer basketball and first-person shooter murder orgies – filling the room with an almost casino-like ambient symphony of bloops, bleeps, and muffled explosions. But the most insidiously popular “game” in my son’s classes was “Spacebar Clicker” – in which the player does nothing but frantically click the Chromebook spacebar (one point per click) like a Skinner box rat on crystal meth. The game sociopathically implores kids, “Try to score 100M in one hour!” When multiple students simultaneously compete for bragging rights to “win” this stupefyingly moronic e-widget, the ensuing din is enough to make your ears weep grey matter. Sweet Jebus – this was what my son was complaining about! It was sheer torturous anarchy – a veritable black hole of learning – and what a shitbird I was for doubting him!
Whenever teachers made the slightest motion towards venturing between desks to police device misuse, the classroom-wide multicolored mosaic of Chromebook screens would suddenly flicker into a uniform monotone as students briskly clicked back to Google Classroom or whatever buggy, poorly designed e-lesson they were supposed to be absorbing via catatonic osmosis.
Most teachers, meanwhile, had zero chance of competing with the galaxy of infinite temptations lurking within the Chromebooks. Converting fractions? Six-part essay structure? Cellular organelles? Yawn. No matter how enthused or dynamic a teacher’s delivery, most was lost – like howling into a blinding, cacophonous digital blizzard. Whenever teachers made the slightest motion towards venturing between desks to police device misuse, the classroom-wide multicolored mosaic of Chromebook screens would suddenly flicker into a uniform monotone as every student briskly clicked back to Google Classroom or whatever buggy, poorly designed e-lesson they were supposed to be absorbing via catatonic osmosis.
I had gone back to seventh grade expecting to perhaps ID a few juvenile miscreants. Instead I felt like I was witnessing the death of western civilization – one spacebar click at a time. For all the hours I had daydreamed in seventh grade about playing Atari or watching Star Trek reruns instead of listening to my French teacher conjugate irregular verbs through her tinny Québec accent, never could I have imagined actually doing those things daily, right at my desk, on school-issued gear—with zero consequence. Passing through a time machine to the present, even my smartass 12 year-old self would have snorted in disbelief, asking “Is this a joke? What’s the point of even coming to school?”
On one level, I understand how we got here. I’ve worked on the web since the ‘90s, and I actually like tech. I’ve always been an early adopter, and knowing how to use computers and the internet has been central to my life. And while I’ve never owned a Chromebook myself, I’ve helped my kids on theirs over the years, and always found them to be innocuous, anodyne gizmos. They’re cheap, clunky, and built to run Google’s versions of snoresville Microsoft Office – fine for everyday computing and most school work. And so I subscribed to what seemed like the common-sense logic of “one laptop per child” – the idea that devices like Chromebooks could teach computer literacy and prepare kids for the future. But now, after seeing them in actual classrooms? I predict we’ll look back on Google’s colonization of American classrooms as providing about as many cognitive benefits as a big bowl of lead paint chips.
Sure, kids need to learn to use the technologies that power 21st century living. But computer literacy has a place: in the computer lab. COVID changed the student/device ratio to 1:1 – putting Chromebooks in every backpack, and in most schools they’re now used to teach every subject, read every lesson, do every assignment, take every quiz, and even dominate teacher-student communication. That hasty and unceremonious flushing of every time-tested analog learning model was arrogantly myopic — exactly what we’ve come to expect from the salivating tech vampire cultists of Silicon Valley, who would gleefully solder modem antennae to first trimester fetuses if we let them.
Remember “Baby Einstein”? Its creators got rich hawking DVDs of saccharine Mozart Casio keyboard muzak that would magically transform your dimwitted toddler into an MIT Phi Beta Kappa. Disney bought that barrel of classist snake oil for $25M in 2001, and today it’s little more than a case study in debunked edutainment hype. Well guess what? Chromebooks are the new Baby Einstein.
Fortunately, it now feels like we’re waking up from an another cultural fever dream, doesn’t it? We Americans have always been predisposed to silly groupthink fads, and even recent educational history is rife with examples of us going hog-wild and getting things spectacularly wrong. Remember “Baby Einstein”? Its creators got rich hawking DVDs of saccharine Mozart Casio keyboard muzak that promised to magically transform dimwitted toddlers into MIT Phi Beta Kappas. Disney bought that barrel of classist snake oil for $25M in 2001, and today it’s little more than a case study in debunked edutainment hype.
Well guess what? Chromebooks are the new Baby Einstein – an untested educational panacea with laughably dubious evidence of any positive outcomes. In fact, US students continue to rank mortifyingly low relative to other nations – quantifiable proof that the shining techno utopia we’d yearned for is actually a blighted intellectual slum, making future generations demonstrably dumber. Gulp.
Yeah, yeah – this is just one mouthy schmuck’s anecdotal screed about one middle school – in kooky-pants, too-permissive California, no less. Maybe Chromebook Hell doesn’t burn quite as hot where you live. But rest assured it’s pervasive, and its impact is devastatingly real. In America’s classrooms, the smartphones may now finally be in retreat, but the Chromebooks are still dug in deep. For now anyway. We’re coming for them next.
Whether you have kids or not, it won’t be long before you’re dependent on today’s youth to run the world while you’re biding time awaiting the grim reaper. We need them properly educated – so they can engineer our bridges, make the government solvent, keep planes from falling out of the sky, do our knee replacement surgeries, and cure cancer, Alzheimer's, baldness, and hemorrhoids.
Oh who am I kidding? AI will do all that.
“OK Google, see you in hell!”
My friend, I'm an elementary school teacher with a master's degree in Learning and Technology, and my students' classroom experience is almost entirely unplugged. I'm intensely picky about the learning tools I provide, so when I do have them use their Chromebooks (and don't get me started on those pieces of busted-ass shit (I have feelings)), web monitoring and limiting software is crucial. Being able to see their screens, shut them down, redirect them, or restrict them to a pre-approved domain - like Chrome Music Lab during free time, or PebbleGo for animal research - is the epitome of micromanagement and a pain in the ass, but it's the only way I've found to keep control over what's going on at their desks. Also, Ctrl+Shift+T reopens closed browser tabs. That's a fun tool to have in your back pocket.
Anecdotes from a former 7th grade English teacher. I taught at a private school with 1:1 Chromebook usage starting in 4th grade. Many of the teachers used tech for every aspect of their lessons; the reasoning they gave was that it was more engaging, but it was clear that the real reason was often laziness. With tech, homework and quizzes can grade themselves, and there is no need to collect and organize paper. My school banned phones and used GoGuardian for Chromebooks, which teachers can use to monitor each device and even close tabs, block websites during their class time, or adjust settings so that only one website is permissible. But many teachers I know never learned all the aspects of this program. As the English teacher, my class sessions were twice the length of others, and Chromebooks only came out to (1) type essays - outlining and drafting were handwritten (2) complete research for said essays, with heavy monitoring from me (3) play IXL class-wide grammar games or vocabulary reviews as a special treat on Fridays, again with strict monitoring. After only a few weeks where my ability to catch every student was clear, most kids simply stopped playing games in my class. I’d rather them avoid work by staring out the window!