Friday, April 13, 2012

Schoolroom 2025

Did that get your attention? As a longtime educator, I often wondered what will happen to our schools once technology supplies us with viable alternatives to the old three r’s; readin’, ‘ritin’, and ‘rithmetic of the early 20th Century. Well, it’s happened. We’re on the cusp of a revolution in education beyond anything man has known in the past. Today I want to discuss serious issues our children and grand children will face.

At one time cut and dried and tried and true, that famous old 3-R curriculum has ballooned into a mish-mash of social, touchy-feely, gobbledygook most adults couldn’t wade through without a pitchfork. Math has always been an objective field, one that had no gray areas to puzzle over. Now, even math has side issues that call for feeling as well as thinking. Oh, not the real math, but what is being taught in some places. And what do teachers allow in their classes these days? Calculators, well before most kids have a secure grasp on mathematic principles. Is it any wonder we’re slipping in the sciences that are dependent on extremely accurate calculations requiring full understanding? Remember; garbage in, garbage out with calculators. Or with computers.

Reading was a bit more obscure because there were so many choices of reading material. Imagine the quandary of the reading instructor now that there are so many more choices available, even for kids. Especially for kids. Still, a good reading teacher can provide a solid path for kids to follow as they sharpen their reading skills. In picking the stories and books kids should read, the teacher makes some critical decisions that are based in part on her social bias. Can’t be helped; that’s the way humans are.

Got an idea where I’m headed with this? Good. Now let’s look at writing. Once the domain of sticklers for traditional penmanship, I fear that may have gone by the wayside as well. I won a prize in eighth grade for penmanship. It took over fifty years before my handwriting deteriorated to the point one has to look closely to be able to decipher it. If I’d not started all those years ago with a hand so steady it looked like the printed word, my writing would have been just a blur long ago. I understand that many schools have downgraded the need for penmanship because we have the word processor, complete with spell-check, electronic dictionaries, and other built-in writing aids.

So far, it sounds like I’m a dim viewer of things electronic, doesn’t it? Nothing could be further from the truth. I am a dim viewer of lazy teaching. Through my years as a student in elementary, middle grade, high school, college, and post graduate studies, I encountered many fine teachers. Selfless souls who labored mightily to pass along everything they’d learned in an effort to help the next generation move up the learning curve. They worked long hours, in meager surroundings, with measly equipment, and received precious little in monetary reward, all for the belief they’d done their best to help mankind.

From the late fifties into the early nineties, I watched more and more ill-prepared teachers enter the school work force as the older generation dropped by the wayside. Time after time, I saw a group of folks more concerned with their pay, vacations, and benefits, than with the need for a good education for their students.

In my first full year of teaching I made a mistake one day. I had bought a dress shirt that was light blue, like shirts TV anchors wore because the blue looked cleaner than white on a black and white TV screen. My students thought it was cool. My superintendent called me into his office to explain why I could not wear white like the other teachers. And if I’d ever taken my tie off in the classroom, I would have probably been sent home to change. Nowadays, in many schools, the teachers resemble homeless folks, not to demean the homeless. Is it any wonder respect for teachers has vanished in most schools?

Okay, enough of that. I think I’ve at least hinted at an approximation of the state of education in our schools today. Who will ride in on his white charger, wave his white hat, and spur us on to a better day? He’s already here, folks. The same technology that gives us low-cost eReaders and other electronic gear, will soon provide a simple, light-weight, multi-function capability, means of storing a year’s worth of curricula, or more. Bye-bye fifty pound backpacks that are causing physical problems for our students. Hello, a way for the bright student to move at his or her own pace. Bye-bye the classrooms where we all try to get along, because that’s more important than whether we learn anything. Group projects, where the bright student carries the loafers, too.

I could go on and outline my concept of 21st Century academic education for our children, but I prefer to let you put your own imagination to work. When we can give our kids everything they need without darkening the door of a school, why should we continue to subject them to a breeding ground for bullies, lazy intimidators, and a place where the lowest common denominator is not a math principle, but the modus operandi?

Put your thinking caps on, ladies and gentlemen, and dream of a better future for the world of education. You tell me what you envision as the schoolroom of 2025 will look like.

PD

21 comments:

  1. Pat, I'm afraid to envision the classroom of 2025. Truly. Technology is wonderful. What happens when the education system is producing products who can only reproduce the technology and operate the technology but don't understand the technology. Will we be bowing to the tin Gods? I'm afraid we will. There is no substitute for learning to read. There is no substitute for learning to write. As in with a pen. When it's a matter of pride to put out a handwriting that is actually beautiful, appreciated as a work of art. But the major problem, to my thinking, is the total lack of discipline. There is none. Teachers can't enforce any, they'll be sued or fired. Parents (not me and I'm happy to say not my kids) are afraid to pop a rear for fear of Child Services. They're afraid to tell a 16 year old they're grounded and can't have a car (let alone tell 'em not only can they not have one, they can't even use the family one unless they earn the right). So I'm afraid I have no solutions, only more problems. And until discipline, as in teaching our children self-discipline and allowing adults to enforce discipline while the kids are acquiring it, is once more the norm and not the exception in America, I am one pessimistic person as to the future of the entire world.

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    1. You are spot on, Gail. I have a solution I'll publish next week, but I wanted to see how many others feel the way you and I do first. What I propose is revolutionary but it solves much of the mess schools are in today.
      If you were as frustrated as I'd guess you were with kids in school, think what it would have been to be one of the old-time teachers and have to watch a good system go down the drain.

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  2. I agree with you about the way technology will help students move along at their own pace. However, if you really think people don't need to learn to get along...I guess you live in a really nice place where people are born knowing such things, and I want to move there.
    I learned lessons on how to get along at home, at school, on the playground, in my extended family, and in public places like church and the grocery store. Most people need a *lot* of schooling in that subject.
    I also get cranky at old people (and I'm one) who think their generation was great and the new generation is lazy. Nope. Not true. Different times call for different skills. If the grumping of grampa and gramma were true (been going on since we could write it down with that newfangled alphabet--and before, since orators like Socrates decried writing and reading as lazy), then we'd be back to pond scum by now.
    We'll still need teachers. We just won't need those mind numbing practice worksheets (which I happened to love because I'm wonky like that).

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    1. I made no statement claiming that kids don't need to learn how to get along. Obviously, they do. But it is the job of the parents and community to teach those lessons. Teachers help. I was one for a long time and I could fill a book with my experiences along that line.
      Next blog, I'll lay out my thoughts about what kind of changes I believe we'll face in the future.

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  3. I was in a great, great system, and it breaks my heart to see the same system today. I worry about my grandson, but my kids were actually in a small private school in a rural county (small = 18 kids in each graduating class, total, no lie) where there still was discipline, prayer before football games, and the boys had their hunting rifles in their pickups and nobody thought a thing about it. 'Cause they were just for hunting and everybody knew it and nobody worried anybody was gonna go ballistic. Austin's future school experiences -- now the thought of that scares me.

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  4. I'll double that "spot on" for Gail. I simple can't envision anything positive for education in 2025 unless some think tank comes up with a completely radical overhaul of our poor disintegrating system. And, further, I so agree on the discipline issue... Folks, we ain't got any! The schools don't/can't provide... The parents don't/can't(?) administer. So, I'll just sit here and be pessimistically depressed until you give us the answer, Pat.
    Joelle

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    1. I'm not sure I have the answer, jsut an answer I think should be considered as we try to work our way out of the morass we've fallen into. On the other hand, I don't see the future as so bleak as to be unthinkable. Remember, we ushered in the atomic age largely with kids who'd been schooled in little one room schoolhouses with a single teacher, usually underprepared and overworked.

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  5. Great post. I can't wait to ask friends what they envision for their kids. Most of my friends here in
    Silicon Valley have their kids in private schools.
    Rather than teach, all they seem to do in TEST Every
    other kid out here has some form of autism. I don't get it. Yes, there are extreme cases. A good friend's daughter has severe non-talking autism. she would
    have been institutionalized years ago. My friend is doing everything possible to get her mainstreamed
    although I don't see how a child that can't stay put in her seat or speak can be mainstreamed into the
    first grade. Fingers crossed.

    I worry about my career as a writer. Will anyone
    want to read literary fiction besides other writers?

    Technology has enhanced our lives in so many great ways. I Google daily. I belong to several great online writer's groups. But it is limiting our
    youth in imagination and critical thinking.
    Thanks for a great post. I will be thinking about
    this for a long time to come...

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    1. After I'd retired from teaching, I was asked to work with a boy who'd been classed as a behavior disorcered student in the early grades. After the eleventh grade, he was finally diagnosed as a true autistic case. And that he was. It took three months to get him to trust me. When he finally opened up as much as he was able to, I learned much about him, but the damage had been done and he'd developed defense mechanisms almost impossible to overcome.
      that was a school failure that had nothing to do with touchy-feely issues, but was strictly driven by strict regimjentation of present day school administration.

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  6. Pat, you've really started something here! And the whole thing boils down -- nobody objects to technology, everyone agrees it's a wondrous thing. Until the technology takes over to the extent that NO ONE has the education to UNDERSTAND it. As in, there comes a point it becomes self-perpetuating but can't be advanced. Because no one will know HOW! Because they aren't taught how to THINK. And they aren't taught how to THINK because they aren't taught CONTROL. They're simply taught that there are no consequences for any action. As I posted earlier, I was fortunate to be able to put my teens in a small private school where the discipline and values were old-fashioned 50's style but it's not big enough to keep up with educational standards like the advanced pre-college courses taught in the gifted programs in public school. And that fact hurt my teens when it came time to take the SATs, not that it prevented them from college or great careers. And though my grandson is currently in Pre-K at that same small private school, and will probably also be there for K, none of us want him to go through grammar school there for that very reason. It's a classic Catch-22 situation. And extremely depressing and frustrating. (I told you you'd be sorry I saw this topic, darlin'!)

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    1. Who's sorry? I'm just happy folks are as concerned with our educational future as I am.

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    2. Yes--if we don't really understand our technology, then we're on the fast track to become the Eloi in the HG Wells story. You have to learn the operation before you can get lazy with a calculator. Still, it's a trend you can see in the disconnect between people and their reality--hence dumb stuff like texting while driving etc. (No, this is not virtual! Therefore, when you hit that cyclist or pedestrian, there is not going to be a "reset" button.

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  7. Someone's been doing some selective reading/listening! Public schools have their problems, but they are far from the rotting cesspools I keep reading about these days. Things were so much "better" back in the 50s because schools were much more homogenous--no special needs kids (they had special schools), no kids with emotional issues (they were suspended), and definitely no minorities. That's what Finland, with its "best schools in the world," deals with. Strip out all the kids that Finland doesn't have to dea lwith--like those--and US kids are on the top of the world. It's a proven statistic, if you're willing to look beyond the "Our schools are FAILING" rhetoric for some real facts.

    We offer kids more opportunities than anywhere else in the world. Is it a perfect system? No. But as someone who's spent a quarter of a century teaching at an inner-city school, I can tell you that the Cassandras need to do some more thinking before they keep wailing the same "the sky is falling!" message.

    When I tell people where I teach, I get one of two responses: the pity face or the "God bless you," as if I take my life in my hands every day. I just have to laugh. Those people know nothing about me, my work, or definitely my kids, who are smart and funny and as deserving of my skills as any kid in my leafy suburb. My class is a place that welcomes them all because I am dedicated, one of the ones who (to echo Pat) works long hours, in meager surroundings, with measly equipment, and receives precious little in monetary reward, all for the belief I am doing my best to help mankind. And I'm not alone. My school is full of teacher of all ages who have the same attitude.

    Technology is a tool, so I use it frequently to enhance my teaching and show them new ways to learn old skills. Do I wish they had better grammar skills? Sure--so I teach them grammar. My own kids are in middle and high school right now, and there's no way I can say with a straight face that they haven't been taught bedrock skills like grammar or multiplication tables or spelling words or maps. I've helped them with their homework. The problem is the simplification and expediency demanded by standardized testing. Since lawmakers have bought the idea that they can make valid comparisons between schools or grade teachers based on test data, you have a problem. The tests are eating more and more instructional time every year. Less time for literature and writing, more for bubbling and boredom. I teach really poor kids who come from homes and situations you thank God every night you don't have to endure. Their test scores reflect that reality...and they reveal that I'm a "bad" teacher. And yet I'm highly-qualified, smarter than the average bear (I have the Mensa card to prove it), and was a finalist for Florida Teacher of the Year. Are you seeing what's wrong with the picture?

    If you want your kids to go to a smaller school, a private one, one that serves prayer alongside the biology, or one where all the kids look just like yours and the values are a close match, too, then you have those options. But understand that the real world doesn't look like that, and every child educated anywhere or any way in this country has to succeed there. What's vital is that you speak up. If you're not happy with what you think is happening in your local schools, quit grousing and DO SOMETHING about it. Volunteer. Spread the news about the great kids and teachers in your community. Go to school board meetings. Best of all, VOTE. Legislators are notorious for passing laws that sound good but do harm. Make them stop. Seriously. The kids I teach and I BEG YOU.

    Time to stop. I have to go in to school--on Saturday, mind you--to help my kids with a practice AP English test. Doesn that sound lazy (them) or undedicated (me) to you?

    As my Daddy would say, "End of Sermonette."

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    1. Sweetie, you need to come walk my counties' public high school halls. Where the security guard has to stand by the ladder the repairman's standing on so that the passing "good kids" don't knock it over as he works. Where a gun's been held to a player's head after a football game for taking another player's "field time". Where the Board meetings are full of screaming parents threatening to sue because a teacher sent their child to the office. Which has become the norm in this region of the country and not the extreme exceptional case.

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    2. Thank you for the sermonette, Mimi. And God bless you and so many others like you who have not abandoned the old school system I live near Kansas City, werhe their schools are exactly the kind of morass I' decryhing. While KC has lots of dedicated teachers such as yourself, the system has failed. Misseraably failed. Now they are in a battle with teh state over who will ride in on that white horse to repair the damage.
      Meanwhile, their graduation rate is well below 50%. the crime rate among teens is skyrocketing, and many who do graduate, can't read well enough to get a job.
      Most of those kids, of whatever ethnicity, come from homes where there is at least one caring parent who could have been utilized in educating their child.
      Technology cannot help these folks in the shrt term, but we have to keep working to find a solution.

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  8. I went to school some years in the 60's in a UK school system. It was rigid and inflexible and didn't teach me as MANY subjects as I might have become acquainted with here in the US--at that time. I did flourish there, because I was allowed to specialize early. I think that's called "accelerated" or something here, sort of college before college. I liked wearing uniforms because that cut down on some of the clothing competition shit that went on in my US high school. Remember--this is the 60's-- land of the cashmere sweater. In those days there was severe discipline, too in the UK, and that didn't bother me either, even when I got punished. Families in general seem to have lost the idea that hierarchy can be a good thing, i.e. ADULTS make judgments and are in control. Nothing, IMO, makes kids freak out more than the idea that there are no boundaries and that Mom & Dad's only purpose in existance is to be their "Yes" men. Technology=Good Thing as the schools are strangled by cost-cutting governments and by unions--deep in their good teacher souls--who should know better.

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    1. I'm all for boundaries. You're right; teens respect them. Uniforms can help, but they're not a panacea. The one issue I'll take with your statement is the assumption about unions. In right to work states (think most of the Southeast), where teachers can be fired for going on strike, unions have ZERO power and function only as collective bargaining representatives--rights being stripped away as we speak by multiple governors as quickly as they can manage. I'm not excusing true union excesses (NYC "rubber rooms" for example), but the idea that monolithic teachers unions are controlling us in lockstep is unfair and wrong. I don't belong to our "union" and I'm in Florida, a right to work state.

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  9. Excellent commentary, Juliet. I wish uniform clothing had been part of my education. Of course, back in those days, only kids who worked on their family farms wore jeans to school. Yes, THAT far back. lol

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  10. Hmm... lots of food for thought here, and different opinions and experiences. I teach at the college level in a lesser developed country, and my problem is to move my students beyond the belief that there are answers to everything and all you have to do is memorize them.

    As a kid, I loved school for the most part, and I want to try and kindle that kind of love and excitement in my students. I've come to believe that what matters more than anything - more than the curriculum, or the educational tools - is the commitment of the teacher. A teacher who really cares can make a difference in the worst situations. Unfortunately, the level of engagement required may really burn that teacher out.

    One more thing. I'm not a huge fan of arbitrary, external discipline (though I think it's sometimes necessary), but I've come to believe that acquiring self-discipline is essential to success in life. You can't solve problems unless you make yourself sit down, do the analysis, examine the alternatives, make and test hypotheses about possible approaches. From my observations, kids today do not really understand the value of self-discipline. This is not something you can beat into them, either. Somehow you need to provide them with experiences that 1) give them a chance to practice self-discipline and 2) allow them to see how effective it is.

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  11. Excellent commentary, Lisabet. You have your finger on the pulse of successful concepts. It's my experience that, where these concepts are widely accepted, we see far fewer of the problems plaguing the others. I'll have more to say on this later this week.
    PD

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  12. Just this week I heard on the news that they're thinking of stretching the school year next year to 12 months. No break for summer. I think that's a mistake. Kids are forced to grow up fast enough. I grew up loving summers because our days were carefree and full of fun. They think kids will learn better if they don't have a break. I think it's about money.

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