Diagnosis

 A student brought me a Chromebook while I was standing in the cafeteria supervising lunch. It came with a note, and the student's reiteration of the information scrawled by a substitute, stating that another student had "dropped" the device on the floor and the screen had cracked, rendering it useless. It was not the first time I was handed a machine in the cafeteria or the playground or a hallway or just about anywhere I can be found on the campus outside of the Computer Lab. I am, after all, The Computer Teacher and I should be available at all points throughout the day to receive broken or defective computers. 

This was, however, the tenth Chromebook to come from this one fifth grade classroom over the past week. To her credit, the substitute in the class was doing what I had asked her which was to make an accounting of the broken and damaged student devices so that I could try and fix or replace them as necessary. 

I did not expect to have ten brought to me over the course of a week.

I was able to resuscitate a few of them, correcting a setting, plugging them in to fully charge, or fiddling with them just long enough to get them back in service. Only to be replaced by another fifth grader standing with yet another Chromebook, note attached. 

I have lived through this scenario a few times over the course of my tenure as Site Technologist, but this last one struck a nerve. It came with a student's name connected to it. Jesse had been struggling while his teacher had been out since before Thanksgiving. Jesse had been struggling before that, all the way back to Kindergarten, and was a kid our staff sighed when we heard his name connected to a disruption or behavior unbecoming of a Horace Mann Jaguar. 

Which is why when I saw that it was Jesse that had "dropped" his Chromebook, smashing the screen, I felt the need to follow up. There is no quick fix for a cracked LCD display. 

I waited for Jesse to finish his lunch, and asked him to come and talk with me, away from his peers. I asked him how the Chromebook came to fall on the floor. What he described was an accident. A moment of carelessness that might have happened to any student in any classroom. It just so happened that this was Jesse, and it was the tenth computer to come out of his classroom over the course of a rather tumultuous week. 

And this is where I stopped myself. I wondered if I was disappointed to find out this was "just an accident." Kids and computers are a pretty dicey proposition on any given day, but if it had been any other student other than Jesse, would I have been more inclined to accept that the screen was broken out of carelessness, or would I have been moved to investigate further. 

Was I looking for some way to make Jesse culpable for this one particular device or maybe even the dozen or so machines that had found their way to my capable hands over the course of the week? 

I realized that I needed to push justice to the background, and work on getting replacements for the class that had hit a "rough patch." It happens. It's not the fault of one kid, or one behavior. We can all learn to be more careful with our technology. 

I carried the corpse back to my room and added it to the stack. We would figure out how to replace it. And instill a little more care in all fifth graders handling Chromebooks.