This Washington Post piece (via a parent of one of my students and WSPA broadcaster, Amy Wood) tugs at my heart strings:

Without ready access to computers, students struggle – washingtonpost.com: “‘I see my friends do their work, and I struggle to get the access I need. It makes me sad,’ said Julija, a hoodie-wearing blonde whose fluent English gives little hint that she emigrated from Lithuania a few years ago. She asks her parents for high-speed Internet, and the answer is always the same: Soon, soon, but money’s tight.”

A great deal of what I do as a teacher pivots on our class blog, GriffinScience. Fortunately, my school has beefed up its wireless technologies and its hardware components so that now a student has multiple access points to the web whether its in our computer lab, in the library or via our collection of school laptops.

However, this story points to the continued failure of our nation to address the real need for reliable and inexpensive access to high speed web access.

Perhaps it was my childhood in rural Mullins, SC that makes this such an important issue for me personally. I constantly dreamed of easier access to the internet as a 7th and 8th grader hacking together computers and various Prodigy, CompuServe and eventually AOL accounts to get access to the incredible resource that was the web in the early 1990′s.

I thought that by the mystical “Year 2000″ we’d certainly have nationwide access, but sadly I was wrong.

Here’s to hoping none of my daughter’s classmates ever have to worry about doing their online assignments when she enters Middle School a decade from now.