A list of pet peeves in education.

If you are a teacher, please consider following some of my suggestions. It would make me happy, and hopefully make your students happier as well.

Technology

I love technology, and I love learning. For whatever reason, I am always annoyed when the two come together. I usually think the old-fashioned way of learning by reading, taking notes, and discussing things in class is better than some newfangled learning method straight out of the teacher conferences.

Don’t require your students to create accounts with some service or log on to something to complete a lesson. Even if it’s free. Students should not need to give their personal information to companies for school purposes.
Don’t include some technology-related thing into your lesson just because you think its cool, or because you want to play with the stuff yourself. Consider whether the use of technology will actually help students learn better.
Some schools have a technology policy that lets each teacher decide whether to allow technology in their classroom. Despite what I said above, its nice if you let your students use technology in your classroom (especially if other teachers in your department allow it, as then students will complain that “it’s not fair!”). For students who are responsible, it can be very useful to look up something without interrupting class or to take notes on a computer.
Unfortunately, some students will try to use technology to do stupid things or play games. I would be inclined to say just let them do whatever they want (it’s their grades), but that tends to create angry students and parents. So maybe let everyone use things the first quarter, and then require an average above a 90 to use technology (unless the lesson requires technology, in which case everyone should participate). I think this would be a great incentive for the students.
Instead of buying chromebooks or iPads, try to convince the school board to buy every student a Raspberry Pi. It would be great if someone actually succeeded with this (and here are some things to do with it).

Plagiarism

It seems most teachers are obsessed with this, especially English teachers. Don’t be so paranoid. Its not good for your health.
That being said, teach your students how to do good citations and to give credit to things they didn’t write. Its always nice to acknowledge other people’s work. Though I don’t do MLA or anything formal, I try to do this on my website by giving links to the places where I learned something.
Make sure you clearly overview what requires citation and what doesn’t so that your students know what to do. Things relating to paraphrasing and summaries are often the most confusing as for citation requirements.

Sources

Be careful not to act as though everything in books is the word of God, while things on the internet are out to trick and deceive. Some teachers tend to sound like this. Just because it costs more to put stuff in a book doesn’t mean its true.
Don’t hate on Wikipedia so much. It’s a great reference. I use it all the time to get an overview of something or to get a summary of a topic I already learned as a review.
Instead of telling your students that Wikipedia is the worst thing ever, teach them how to read their sources critically. They should be critical of everything they read, whether it comes from an encyclopedia, an internet article, or Wikipedia. Every source has bias and could have misinformation, and students need to learn to recognize it.
Wikipedia is a perfectly valid starting place for research. If I want an overview of a topic, most of the time the Wikipedia article is the best for getting the gist of something. But every source should be verified against other sources. Look in the references for an article and go read those to verify the article. This is also a good way to find other sources (I do this a lot).
If you are one of those wonderful teachers who doesn’t hate Wikipedia, great!