Ufa teacher on online gradebooks: 'Entering all grades can drive you crazy'

UFA1.RU spoke with a teacher from a city school to find out how educators feel about changes in accessing electronic gradebooks. He acknowledges it has become more difficult but believes returning to «paper» won«t fix the situation. We are publishing his opinion.

The author preferred to remain anonymous, but for context we note that he is a certified teacher who received his higher education at Bashkir State University (now Ufa University of Science and Technology) and has been teaching at a Ufa school for five years. The author«s opinion may not coincide with the editorial board»s.

By the time I entered the profession, schools already had electronic gradebooks and diaries. For most, it was already the norm back then. Conditions periodically change, but gradually everyone adapts. Now there are parents who refuse to download the Max app or connect to it. That«s their right, but most of the data needed for the app has already been submitted to the school.

Parents also complain that teachers don«t explain anything to them, but we aren»t hiding anything from them. We simply don«t know more than they do. We were given instructions on how to work with it, but no one explains the why either. Before, you could log into Elschool with a regular username and password—now it»s through Gosuslugi (the State Services portal) and Max. That«s just how it is.

Yes, there are still difficulties with this. A parent can«t (or doesn»t want to) log into the app and starts writing and calling, asking to send everything to them personally. Sometimes parents complain that grades were entered late. We have a rule about deadlines: everything should be entered by 17:00 for the first shift.

But for the second shift, lessons sometimes last until 19:00—everything should be in by the evening. I can easily believe that someone might sometimes fail to enter everything by at least 20:00. Well, imagine what it«s like for a teacher after 12–13 lessons. It»s certainly a problem, but a paper diary won«t fix it.

Personally, I prefer working online. The electronic gradebook makes work transparent and fast. You don«t have to collect diaries and write everything out by hand—you enter grades, add a comment, the average score is calculated automatically. Although even here, by the time you»ve entered and commented on everything for everyone, it can drive you crazy. But what would it be like to do that on paper?

By the way, I don«t remember teachers commenting on every grade in paper diaries back in the day. But they are still needed now so that children who don»t have access to the apps can write down their assignments. We only keep one record—the electronic one, period. Can a teacher enter everything both online and on paper? Do you want to add double the work for us? Do you think we don«t have enough?

Previously, the mother of two schoolchildren spoke out about the new rules for accessing electronic diaries. In her opinion, protesting online apps is pointless, but they need improvement, and everything with «paper» was much simpler.