Fourth grade gave Maika a headache.
It’s not the curriculum at Richmond Elementary School, where Maika is part of the school’s Japanese dual immersion program. It’s the computers.
Maika describes jam-packed school days of six hours and 30 minutes, with time blocked out for everything from fractions to kanji, the core of the Japanese writing system. And as it turned out, Maika spent a good bulk of the school day on computers; in the classroom, they estimate they clocked three to four hours of screen time each day.
That’s well above the amount of time Portland Public Schools officials estimate elementary school students should spend on screens. At a June 15 School Board meeting, Dr. Renard Adams, the district’s chief accountability and equity officer, discussed screen time expectations around the district’s math curriculum facilitated by learning software i-Ready. Adams said screen time on the platform for elementary schoolers shouldn’t exceed 40 minutes a week.
Maika says that standard doesn’t match the reality at Richmond. “That’s not true,” Maika said, when presented with the expected limit.
Maika’s not a fan of computers. Oftentimes, software programs provided only one explanation for how to solve a problem in math when Maika really needed to be shown another way to thoroughly understand. There have also been physical consequences: Maika’s eyes are often dry at school, and lights from the screen trigger headaches.
“[Screen time] is getting more and more,” Maika says. “I don’t like it. It’s weird. I don’t understand a bunch of it. My math was getting a bit bad because of the Chromebooks, I think, and then when I did it with my dad, he helped me.”