Technical Difficulties

So I was all relaxed and at peace in summer vacation mode until I read this post (Me No Cavewoman) by Tense Teacher.  (It's amazing how my profession, which I dearly love and plan to keep doing 'til my ten toes point to the sky, can also raise my blood pressure to red-line levels in the space of, oh, five minutes!)  She admits in the opening paragraph that she's "a bit of a geek," then proceeds to list the content of a tech workshop she attended on new technology, that being, "Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, touch-screen technology, voice-over IP, MP3 players, cell phones, blogs and wikis."  Then she continues on, "Seriously?  That is “new” technology?"  All right, so she's an early adopter in a course that deals with what is now much more the mainstream, and it didn't break any new ground for her.  I hate wasting time, so I can relate to her frustration, even though I know there's a lot I still have to learn about those topics (and don't plan to, so there you go).  But then she goes on to make a statement that REALLY burned my cheese:

"I just don’t understand people who want to teach children but don’t take the time to continue learning themselves."

Well, that's a hell of a conclusion to reach, and it's based solely on the fact that a lot of her fellow attendees weren't very comfortable with technology.  I agree with the sentiment, of course, but TT's whole definition of learning seems to be based on computer literacy and that alone.  That's roughly akin to saying that the only subject area that matters is x (fill in the blank - math, science, English, history, art, philosophy, whatever) and any other subject doesn't really count as learning.  Technology's great, and it has its place, but in the end it just a tool - and any educator worth his/her degree should have lots of tools from which to choose.  I feel about technology the way I feel about my car:  I want to use it to get from Point A to Point B, and then I don't want to think about it.  My husband, on the other hand, gets all engrossed in calipers and brake pads and adjustable pillow ball front camber/caster plates (yeah, I had to cut and paste that). So I use the car to get from Point A to Point B, and I put gas in it and ask him to change the oil, and he putters around with his camber/caster plates, and we both get what we need out of it - so who's to say which one of us has a more "worthy" goal for using the car? 

Furthermore, I get very suspicious of people who get all engrossed in technology qua technology.  I don't Twitter because I have a hard enough time not checking my Facebook status every ten seconds, and I don't need another distraction.  I don't use SmartBoards or Moofolio.  I wouldn't know a Plurk if it kissed me on the Plips, and to me NING is the ending that makes a verb into a gerund.  Does that make me a bad teacher?  On the other hand, I read the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and the Economist (both print and online versions) as well as educational texts about teaching literacy in the content areas and writing in the social studies.  Does that make me a good teacher?  The answer to both questions is the same:  It's no guarantee.  I'm happy to use technology in my classroom, and I do, but I want to know that the technology is serving the content and not the other way around.  I make sure to offer students multiple options for presenting their learning throughout the school year, including WebQuests, scrapblogs, power points, podcasts, videos, whatever, but the question I always ask them is, Why is this method the best way to present your learning?  (I also warn them that they had better be conversant with whatever bells-and-whistles they're using, because I can't help them there.) I've gotten any number of shite student projects over the year that were nicely filmed or attractively presented, but weren't even remotely connected to the concepts being assessed.  Yay, you know how to use iMovie!  Now how about being able to reach a logical conclusion, or use facts to support an argument?  No?  Hmmm.  How about we try some good old fashioned class discussion?  Or essay writing?  Sure, we can do that via Skype, or on a blog, or a wiki or a pliki or whatever, but we can ALSO do it TOGETHER, in a room, face to face with each other!  Amazing.

This post reminds me of a situation at my previous district.  We had gotten a new email program and the tech staff had sent out a typically arcane email in September that launched right away into a big long discussion about folders and filters and files, all in some kind of techspeak that vaguely resembled English except for the fact that none of the concepts in it made any sense. So we teachers all did what any reasonable human being does, and we ignored it.  Several months later, after fielding any number of irate parent phone calls over our failure to respond to months' worth of emails, we found out what that email had been trying to tell us:  The tech staff had installed a filter on the email program to weed out junk emails, which basically meant that any and all out-of-district emails would be bounced automatically to the spam file if you hadn't sent that person an email first.  Here's the thing:  NO ONE on the faculty had understood the tech staff's first email - even teachers who were computer literate and technologically savvy.  Why?  Because the tech staff, while they knew their bits and bytes, had NO IDEA how to communicate their thoughts in a way that other people could comprehend and apply.  Isn't that the whole f*&@ing point of all this electronic wizardry?  What good does it do us to plink and plonk and plurk if we can't form a coherent thought in the first place??

When I think back over my own education, the teachers I remember fondly had wildly varying tolerances for technology.  Some loved it, some hated it, some stopped paying attention after the quill pen was replaced by the fountain pen. What they all had in common was an ability to draw a roomful of diverse people in and make us all interested, truly interested, in their topic by getting us to think long and deep and hard about something we'd not considered before. Technology doesn't do that.  Teachers do that.  If I can use technology to encourage kids to think, well, that's great.  But I'm smart enough not to confuse the two.  TT concludes her post by saying, "I thought our goal was to help prepare our students to be fully functioning, fully contributing members of society someday.  I didn’t get that wrong, did I?"  No, honey, you are right on the money.  But I would argue that the teacher who teaches students to think and reason and question and wonder using just a chalkboard and a podium does far more toward making a "fully contributing member of society" than one who teaches them to use all the whiz-bang technology in the world and loses sight of what it's for.

Comments

[Carrie]

Amen, sister, amen! Please explain to me how technology is going to teach a child to write a thesis statement or avoid using faulty logic. That post you mention burns my butt as well.