Two School Days Without a Laptop

To test the Blake curriculum on how reliant it was on laptops, and to test how not using a laptop made me feel, I decided to “forget” my laptop at home for two days. In all, I found that Blake is not as reliant on laptops as I thought, and they mainly use them for typing.

Before I started, I made rules for myself. I would leave my laptop at home for two days. The test would be over after I left the bus in the afternoon. I tried to have my experiment not interfere with learning, so I re-did all the work that I knew I would have to do on a laptop. I also did not count projections, so any videos, presentations, or documents that were projected onto the whiteboard didn’t count. Here is how my day went:

Social Studies

Social Studies was the only class that greatly relied on a laptop. I had already done most of the assignments in preparation, so I didn’t have to do anything. There was one assignment on our laptops that I did not know about, so I had to find a workaround using one of the school computers, but it wasn’t an ideal solution.. I mostly just walked around and helped other people with their assignments. This did mean I got distracted looking at other people's laptops.

English

English was the second most laptop-reliant class. We had to type a lot in this class, and all of that was on a computer. Compared to Social Studies, there were fewer screens, because most note-taking is done with notebooks, not with laptops. I wrote by hand in this class, and it worked fine.

Science & Math & Spanish

We didn’t have to use our laptops for these classes. Yay! One thing I did notice, though, is that many students use their laptops at every free moment. That includes before and after class starts, and breaks during class.

Art & PE & Choir

I knew I wouldn’t need my laptop for these classes, so I was surprised when we had to look up & print a reference in visual arts to base our drawing on. Luckily, I found a book to serve this purpose.

X-Block

On the first day of my experiment, we had a house activity. I chose to go outside, and I didn’t need my laptop. For the next day, I went to Service Club during Tutorial to count the clothes from the Warm Winter Wear Drive. I didn’t need my laptop there either.

Overall, the Blake Curriculum is much less reliant on screens than I thought. Students do use laptops a lot in a day, but much of that is playing video games, checking their email or Canvas, or doing other non-educational things.

Although Blake takes pride in its 1:1 student laptop ratio, the school would work fine without it.