A Mobile WiFi Network On School Buses – The End Of All Homework Excuses
School buses are tough places for children, just as tough as the schoolyard some would say. There is always bullying, screaming, loud and rude noises, running up and down, and so on.
This has annoyed enough people though, that someone is finally doing something about it.
A report in the New York Times finds that in a school district in Arizona, their yellow school buses are everyday mysteriously quiet all the way to school early in the morning somehow; and all the high school students on it, are just busy minding their own business, tapping away at their homework on their laptops.
It didn’t really take much to get this to happen; they just gave their buses a WiFi network: they put a mobile router on the bus, and turned it into a roving hotspot.
As soon as this happens, and the children have laptops, somehow the most dysfunctional busload of schoolchildren you ever saw, turns quiet, studious, and focused on their homework. The driver apparently noticed how there is not as much violence back there as there used to be.
This taps into a problem every pupil has, and cleverly uses it in a positive way. Children typically love to put off doing their homework until the very last hour.
They just never remember the urgency of it, how it’ll feel at school the following day when they show up unprepared.
When you put them on a quiet bus, and give them the material they need to catch up with their homework, a laptop and a working WiFi network, the urgency of showing up empty-handed at school catches up with them, and they quickly settle down to some productive work on the bus.
They had better, or else, they’re going to have nothing at school an hour later. So, a rowdy bunch, if you give them a chance to do their homework at the last hour, suddenly turns into the most well behaved set of children you ever saw on the Western Hemisphere. An example of Nevada, thinking outside the box.
Actually, according to the report, they’re trying to take this up across the country: Florida, DC, and others. School districts where children have to take particularly long bus rides, will find some especially good use for the long hour-and-a-half bus ride to have to make everyday.
The school authorities, just hit upon this plan, when they happened to make use of a data card themselves on a long drive on school business.
When they tried it out on the bus, it cost no more than a couple of hundred dollars, and no matter where the bus takes the children, on a match between schools, on a school picnic, the children loved the chance to catch up on their studies or their homework.
If there isn’t the pressure of a pending homework assignment deadline, one wonders how long the call of a video game can be resisted. Of course, there is a downside to everything, but at least, there is the satisfaction of knowing that the children have that extra hour to do their homework.
