Responsibility

This week, my colleague and I have been taking up the MLTI computers and getting them ready to reimage for next year. These IBooks are a great learning tool and we are really lucky to live in a state where they are issued to each seventh and eighth grade student. My concern is though that the students seem to take them for granted and do not take good care of them. This is not all students. In fact, most of the the students do take care of them but as I have said to the principals: When they are good, they are very, very good and when they are bad they are AWFUL! We have had several broken screens, lots of lost or broken chargers and many cases have so much writing on them that they look like a subway wall in a big city that is filled with graffiti. We have meetings with parents at the first of the year and explain the students will be charged for lost chargers and broken screens but at the end of the year, I am faced with writing to parents and requesting payment for their child’s lack of regard for these learning tools.  I try to explain to everyone that when the laptops are misused, they don’t work as well and it takes time and money to fix the problems so that students can use them next year.  How do we teach our children responsibility for school tools?  I think this teaching has to start when the children are very small.  Do we live in a society where we are so busy that we sometimes fail to teach these important life lessons.  How often do we replace things that are carelessly broken by our kids instead of expecting them to somehow help foot the cost of that replacement.  Even young children can do “chores” to help and thus learn responsibility.  This article from the University of Virginia gives some interesting ideas, including changing the caregivers behavior!  http://www.ext.vt.edu/pubs/family/350-052/350-052.html What ideas do you have?