Edgar Allen Poe’s Twitter Feed

 

Now it’s time to go into the classroom.

This is kind of a mess and not nearly as organized as I thought it would be, but really, this is all about just me emptying all these thoughts out of my brain to make room for…what? I don’t know…Perhaps you’ll find a helpful nugget here or there.

Look, I love information. It’s a vice really – an odd expression of gluttony, I think. And here in the homeschool, we are all about using the Internet for information. I have a houseful of books, but we still were constantly turning to the Internet to watch videos on The Kids Should See This or Periodic Videos or Khan Academy or the Art of Problem Solving. As my youngest son tackles more and more challenging piano music, being able to quickly find a video or two with various interpretations of his Beethoven or Ginastera is invaluable – especially now with this great genre of videos in which the score is shown as the music is played.

 

 

 

And believe me – if I were in a classroom again – I’d use it. I was Queen of the Overhead Projector (fancy!)  back in the day, so I’d be lying if I didn’t think that I’d be all over certain types of tech in the classroom.

Um…not me. No. 

But I keep coming back to this, in trying to figure out my discomfort and objections with the current push. I think it’s about the difference between presentation and process. I’m all for getting as much information as we can to students. I just have deep doubts about the value of using this kind of tech as learning tools: as tools in helping students absorb, process, write and compute. They obviously have their place, and what defines the modern workplace but screens for everyone from physicians to attorneys to architects to cashiers to the utility workers I see standing in the road, head tilted looking to the guy up in the air, tablet balanced in one hand.

It all comes down to what we think formal education is for. I think it’s for helping students learn to read, write, compute, reason and engage with the world outside their own personal bubble of individual experience. I am simply not convinced that a tech-heavy classroom experience helps in that regard,  am definitely sure that it’s not necessary, and am deeply suspicious of profit-making entities that are trying to convince me otherwise.

I’ve said this before in the context of discussions about Common Core: No one is making money when teachers are using ten-year old textbooks.

(For the record, my younger son’s Algebra teacher does use an at-least 10-year old textbook, no tech to speak of, knows her stuff, teaches her stuff very well, and calls it a day. My hero.)

I’ve been observing the classroom tech revolution from a slight distance for years now, as my own children have experienced formal education. Before these last two, the last one I had in any kind of K-12 school was my daughter, now in law school, who graduated from a public IB high school in 2010, really before handheld personal tech was pervasive. These last two have been in Catholic schools off and on, with our longest stretch being the present-day senior, who’s been in brick and mortar Catholic schools for four years now.

I just put that out there as a framework for my observations.

I’ll begin with a story.

A couple of years ago, I attended a beginning-of-the-school year parent night. You know – parents go, kid’s schedule in hand, and navigate the halls, laughing about being lost, going to their child’s classes.

It was time for a chemistry class. The teacher had all kinds of things to say – the usual things that teachers say now about all the information is out there, so easy to find – so conveying information is not our job anymore. It’s about facilitating the students’ self-driven learning through discovery….

Etc. Which is fine.

So she brought out her prize tech. It was this thing – it’s hard for me to remember exactly how it worked – but it was some kind of model of an atom that she could manipulate in some way, coordinated with an internet program that was of course projected on the screen – the point of which was, according to her as she struggled with it – to introduce students to these elements in a way that was more interesting than just reading about it on a page and engaged them and forced them to reason their way to discovering what this atom was –

….and she struggled and struggled, and couldn’t make it work, and finally, in the end, she set it down on the table and shrugged.

How many times have my kids come home from school with stories just like this? Of so much precious classroom time spent on teachers punching buttons, clicking remotes, fiddling with keyboards, calling over the resident Classroom Computer Genius to help, and finally….giving up?

Are glitches like this a solid argument? No, of course not, They’re anecdotes, and there are probably many more anecdotes of successful use of this kind of tech.

But when I consider the whole picture, from preparation to assessment, I wonder.

I consider all the time spent by classroom teachers and administrators shopping for technology, learning how to use the tech in in-services and on their own time, figuring out log-ins, passwords and privacy issues, setting it up in the classroom and then standing there in front of students, vainly clicking buttons – I wonder. I just wonder.

Is it really that much better than opening a book, going over a passage, inviting discussion and giving time to work problems or write an analysis with pen and paper in a notebook?

Could that chemistry teacher have saved a lot of time by simply saying to her students, “Yeah, memorize these elements and then when you come to class, we’ll do something interesting with them. “

And then there are the assignments.

Whenever I write about these things, I’m always trying to point out that the problems I’m bringing out are really not anything new. They’re reflective of behavior and choices we make in other contexts.

So, if you’ve been in a classroom as a teacher or student (which should cover everyone) – you know about Projects. I hate Projects, but of course as a teacher, who didn’t give them? I did – at the end of a hideous week, when you really didn’t want to talk to this crew who, in turn, don’t want to listen to you either – eh, break into groups, discuss the Beatitudes and make a poster on how to apply them In The Modern World.

We all do it, and we know what we’re doing and we’re a little ashamed.

As my kids have traveled through school, I’ve noticed that it’s easier and easier to assign Time-Sucking Projects because now you have the added cover of It Will Ready Them for the 21^st Century Workplace.

Because – why?

Because they’re doing a PowerPoint (or Google Slides) presentation on the Industrial Revolution, they can “collaborate”  via Google Classroom, they can write a Twitter Feed in the style of Edgar Allen Poe, they can do a podcast on the Bill of Rights, they can create a web-based survey on breakfast habits for nutrition class.

The Big Lie, of course, is that this in any way “prepares” anyone for the workforce. Fifteen-year olds aren’t going to be in professions for another ten years, and who knows what tech will look like then? Really? Having my kid have to use computer time at home to pull images about the cotton gin off the internet and slap them on a powerpoint is going to prepare him for…what exactly?

What I’ve noticed is a definite uptick in this type of shiny-seeming assignments that take several days of classroom time to prepare (in groups! On our devices!) and then several more days to present, and less and less time – read none – given to close readings of texts and explorations of language and theme. Let’s take a week and a half to do create what is essentially Buzzfeed Personality tests on the characters from Uncle Tom’s Cabin but never once delve deeply into what Stowe is doing or how she is doing and why that was radical and history-changing.

I don’t think my kids are going to be prepared for the modern world by being taught to be one more screen and internet-dependent drone. They’re going to be prepared by being taught to observe, notice, analyze, critique, discuss, reason and write. Anything that serves that is a good, and I’m not convinced this current Classroom Tech Paradigm does.

I also have issues with internet-dependent assignments in another way: when a teacher gives an assignment that requires work on the internet, especially for pre-high school kids. I wish they’d just…stop. And not do this. How many of us are fighting continual, day-and-night long battles over screen time in our homes? How does it help us when we’ve finally reached a settlement – yup, no video games or screen time except on the weekends, for example – and then the kid comes home saying, “I have to get some pictures from the internet” or “I have to watch this video for school.”

It doesn’t. Not to speak of issues of access. I suppose teachers doing this are correct in their assumptions that all of their students have easy online access at home, but should they? Even if we do, think of all that happens. A couple of months ago, we were without internet for four days – and only got it back that soon because I yelled about it enough to Spectrum – they were happy to give me another week of waiting.

And then there are other issues related to specific cases: issues of the impact of all-day screen time (which is what you’re getting now in schools as they go full-on-tablet in place of books or full-on-Chromebooks in place of paper) on the human brain, and the impact on students who have issues that make dealing with screens difficult. A friend of mine had a son who suffered a concussion could not return to school for a much longer time than originally anticipated because of the school’s use of SMART boards. He just couldn’t take it.

(Again – if I were in the classroom – boy, would I love a SMART board – not going to lie.)

Finally, let’s talk about software – specifically, the software used to record assignments and grades, accessible to teachers, students and parents. They are legion, because, of course, there’s a lot of money to be made. It can be confusing.

In one school, for example, you have a couple of things going on. You have RenWeb, which is the portal through which families and students access information like schedules, homework and grades. Everyone has a password to this. Teachers are supposed to put homework and grades up on RenWeb. You – a parent – can get on there, and see what Junior’s got due next Friday and the grade he got on what was due last Friday.

It seems like a great thing. Communication!

And sure – why not. It keeps us less-than-organized teachers honest, for sure. It minimizes the chances of Junior hiding that bad grade.

But it’s also kind of weird. I’m going to try to explain. I was all over RenWeb when I first encountered it years ago, but now I can’t stand it. It’s not just because my kids are older and I don’t think their growth is helped by me looking over their shoulders on this stuff.

It’s because – geez, louise – I don’t want to know. It stresses me out. Just send me a report card, okay?

I’ve got enough going on, you know? I don’t need to have every detail of what – sixteen or so – classes other people are taking being planted in my head and growing there.

And as for grades – on the one hand, I appreciate it. But on the other…

I suppose what happens is that the school sets parameters for notification – if a kid gets a grade below a certain level, a notification is sent to parents, automatically. They call it, “Getting a RenWeb.”  Mark got a RenWeb yesterday and he’s grounded. That sort of thing.

At the high school, they usually show up in the email about five minutes after dismissal – so yay, you get to greet your kid when she comes home from school with everyone already in a bad mood. In one of the elementary schools my children attended, they were generated a few minutes after school began – so, good – you as a parent are stewing all day about this 0 in spelling that you got just as you drove away from car line, again – ready to greet the kid at the end of the day in a mild fury, only to learn that, oh, Ms. Teacher just didn’t enter that grade yet.

I get it. It’s a decent system, and saves schools and teachers a lot of trouble from pissed-off parents screaming You didn’t tell me he was failing! Well…yes we did.

But for me – and for other parents I’ve talked to – we just don’t even check the online grades any more, not because we don’t care, but because we find that it just adds another level of stress to life at home. TMI, as they say.

And then there’s Google Classroom. Growing now like some creepy monster, everywhere. I don’t like it. I don’t like  – read yesterday’s post – putting all of this in the hands of a for-profit corporation that’s scraping data and has the power to control content. I don’t know about your school, but in schools my kids have attended, parents don’t have automatic access to their kids’ Google Classrooms. You can certainly get the log-in information, but it’s not offered as a family thing. It’s your kid, his or her classmates, the teacher and whoever else is involved in this online “classroom” sharing information.

I’m not comfortable with it.

(For the record – we never did online homeschool classes, either, and I don’t anticipate doing it, even if we homeschool high school for my youngest.)

Educational technology is a gift for many reasons. It’s not evil. It’s even a Godsend to some who, because of educational technology, can access information and develop skills they wouldn’t be able to otherwise because of home situations, cultural conditions or even disabilities. Certain classes require a lot of computer work. No question, no argument.

I think what I’m simply trying to say is that with this, as with everything else, we always have to be deeply aware of our temptations and our worst instincts: our temptations to take the easy way out, to grab attention quickly but then, on the other hand, make things quiet, manageable and quantifiable as a room full of kids in headphones swipe, tap and study their screens.

But at least they’re quiet – right?

Related: my gripe about a Spanish curriculum with a lot of bells and whistles.