If there’s one thing students can always rely on at this school, it’s that the equipment will never work as intended.
As a senior who’s seen almost everything go wrong in a classroom, I can promise you that the only thing that stays consistent is that school technology and other equipment never seem to get their job done.
For instance, let’s say you recently came home from school and can’t wait to procrastinate on your homework for the next six hours. Unfortunately for you, your mom barges into your room demanding why you’ve been marked absent in all of your classes that day.
As you struggle to prove your innocence to your mom, it hits you. That dastardly scanner didn’t sign you in! AGAIN!
The scanners which students use to manually sign themselves in to class every period seem to have a lower success rate than the Oakland A’s.
One would assume that for a school-mandated policy that has been in effect for an entire school year, all the kinks and bugs would have been ironed out by now. Well, I hate to break it to you, my fellow peers, but it seems as if the scanners have merely gotten worse with age, kind of like curdled milk.
With the attendance system as faulty as this, my senior government class has chosen to go back to the old-fashioned way of taking attendance, eliminating the need for scanners entirely.
Another piece of terrible technology students may have noticed in some of their classrooms are the overhead projectors.
Consider yourself lucky if you’ve never had the displeasure of sitting in a classroom when the projector happens to burn out. Especially when it’s during a crucial review period before an upcoming test.
Coupled with the fact that projectors can take days to repair, it can become quite daunting for some teachers to cover material. Oftentimes, teachers without a working projector have to lug around a trolley with a portable projector on top of it, complete with many plugged-in wires to get the job done. Welcome back to the 1990s, my friend.
Although this dysfunctional equipment does have this potential workaround, one piece of equipment that defies easy resolution when it malfunctions is the classroom thermostat.
I can’t be the only one who notices that in the morning, when it’s the coldest it can possibly be, classrooms blast their AC as if trying to bring on the next ice age. But the very second lunch passes and the quad becomes a glorified desert, heaters inside all classrooms, especially those in the main building, happen to turn on.
It’s almost as if the thermostat turns classrooms into a real-life icy-hot, with students enduring the worst of each extreme at the worst possible times.
So the next time the scanner decides to take an unauthorized vacation or the projector decides it’s time to become a pyrotechnic sensation, just accept the chaos. After all, who needs perfect attendance when the alternative is freezing like a popsicle in class?
