Last week, my daughter, grade 6, had to turn in an illustrated graph for Science. She was proud of the beautiful colored pencil work she did and I loved the fact that she actually had a paper-based assignment. As is typical of my creatively-brained child, however, she realized the morning it was due that she was also supposed to write an “artist’s statement.”  

With just ten minutes left before she needed to leave for school, she ran to get her school-issued laptop to finish the written portion. Shoveling bites of cereal in her mouth while she tried to start up the low-quality computer, her stress level increased with every minute the machine whirred and hummed. 

I am not exaggerating when I say it took five minutes to boot up. 

By this point, her anxiety was palpable: “It’s not starting up! I’m not going to be able to get this done! This is so frustrating!” 

I offered paper and pencil– “You can write it down and hand it in this way!” 

No.

I offered to have her dictate the statement to me to type on my computer– “I can email it to the teacher!” 

No.

“We’re supposed to do it on the computer!” she moaned. 

Finally, the computer started, and she logged in to her Schoology account, found the Science class “page” (Schoology is kind of like Facebook for schools, oddly), and started typing.