Chromebooks are made out of plastic, children are not very careful, and people don't value free things they're given.

> Chromebooks are made out of plastic

Wait to see what happens to devices made of glass !

Jest aside, any device lasting even two or three years in a school environment is kinda of a big deal given the daily abuse it will get.

Plastic isn't necessarily a bad thing, metal tends to dent and deform while plastic has some elasticity. It depends on what plastic they use.

E.g. thinkpads usually use a composite plastic (carbon/glass fiber), which makes them lightweight, durable, and thermally insulated from your body. Chromebooks definitely use the cheap stuff though.

I have a ThinkPad Chromebook and it is very solid and durable, even though it was a bargain.

We had macbook airs at school and they were similarly destroyed because people would just carelessly chuck them around.

Pedagogically, it would seem the answer to that would be to have the classroom be a computer lab on the first day of school, and then make the kids work (running laps, taking quizzes on having done the reading) before they earn the laptop to take home.

But then you can't export the work of designing and implementing homework into some faceless corporation who's only real goal is to appeal to administrators, not teachers or kids, certainly not to match course material or learn.

I've seen an explosion of online homework recently and it's all confusing and either way to easy or waaayyyy too hard with very little of the partial credit and recourse that an actual person grading a paper assignment has.

Which comes from the same place that Microsoft Teams craptacularity comes from. The people buying the product aren't the ones using it. Computerized homework could auto adjust to be not too hard and not too easy, by changing the difficulty of the next problem, based on how the student did with the previous problem. But implementing that is beyond our capabilities, apparently.

Teachers were building lesson plans around everything being on the laptop, and that all students would have one available. A student couldn’t just be restricted to not taking laptops home, because that means that student either can’t do their homework, or has to do their homework afterschool, which would require parent involvement.

The sorts of kids with laptop issues were not the children with high parent involvement.

Nah, that won't work either, kids forget about that very fast. You don't sound like you've got kids yourself either.

Kids aren't all or nothing. They remember, and they also forget.

The only thing that really works are repeated reminders and attentive consequences, over a sustained period of time.

Also, adults don't typically have coworkers grab their laptop and smash it because they're disliked.