Computers in a Classroom

While on a recent vacation, I indulged myself by reading as many as three newspapers a day, none of them my hometown paper. They were Seattle Times, Wenatchee World, and USA Today. During the course of my vacation, I forget which day, I read an article, presumably in one of those papers, about a school somewhere in which some teachers, presumably a special education department, had been able to equip their students with iPads to aid their academically challenged students’ learning. Such a substantial and expensive purchase of equipment was presumably made possible by some sort of grant.

I realize the above sounds impossibly vague, but I did not keep the paper, and when I got home and started looking for the article on one of the papers’ websites, I had no luck. Either the paper had not posted the article to its website, or it had done for a day or two, but had not archived it, or I read the article somewhere else entirely. Apologies. Then, my modem died, ending the search. So, time has passed. Nevertheless, I hope to find the article yet.

The important thing is that this use of computers in the classroom appears to have been a teacher initiative. A group of teachers saw how this equipment could be employed as a learning tool to benefit their students. They saw how technology could meet a need, and they had a plan to employ it and integrate it into their curriculum.

This is exactly as it should be, teachers as agents of change in their own schools. (The word “reform” has become so fraught that I have difficulty using it in any positive sense.) This represents true progress.

I have no idea whether this experiment will succeed, whether it will fail, or whether it will be only a qualified success, the results not really justifying the expense and/or effort of the project. If it succeeds, it will be built upon, and others may emulate it and adapt it to their specific circumstances. If it fails utterly, it can be abandoned as a blind alley and eliminated from further consideration. If it doesn’t succeed but shows some promise of success, it can be modified and improved and re-evaluated as an ongoing process of continuous improvement. Evolution.

I realize that Reformists sneer at mere “evolution” and demand nothing less than total Revolution. So they keep saying. But I wonder: If they get their Revolution, in their new regime, who will be the Kulaks?

I regard this experiment, ignorant though I am of its particulars and its outcome, to be a more viable course for the future than anything I have heard yet from the Reformists. Teachers are already innovative, always looking for new materials and new ways to present those materials.

I have long observed that the curriculum written by classroom teachers is more workable and more successful in application than any amount of curriculum written by some “curriculum czar” and his lackeys in some district or state office. The teacher who has had a hand in writing curriculum will be evaluating it from day one of implementation, and if something doesn’t work, he will not be afraid to change it or replace it because he “owns” it. On the other hand, curriculum that is handed down from on high is usually “carved in stone,” with no “user-serviceable parts.”

So it is with materials. For many years I was fortunate to teach in a school district where committees of teachers wrote the curriculum their respective departments. We were guided by and worked within the parameters of the state curriculum guide, or frameworks, or whatever it was called then. We were not rigidly bound by it. Then, we selected materials that expressed the aims of that curriculum. We were not bound to a single literature anthology and single grammar book as we were when I was a whippersnapper in high school. We would spend a quarter in one and a quarter in the other; you could set your calendar by it. Curriculum? You have a book, now teach it! Although it must have I can attest that it must have been adequate to make me literate, (I’m writing now, am I not?), I can also attest that it was scarcely inspiring, nor was it probably intended to be.

In fact, the curriculum was the textbook(s), and the textbook was the curriculum. For all practical purposes, curriculum was written by the textbook publishers. I do not recall much attention being paid to writing. But perhaps that was because neither Unit Lessons in Composition nor Lucile Vaughan Payne’s The Lively Art of Writing had yet emerged upon the scene.

Make technology available to teachers for classroom use, and they will figure out curriculum-appropriate applications. Then, successful applications may make changes to the curriculum itself possible. Technology has the potential (but no more than that) to be a powerful instructional tool (no more than that, no less).

However, I fear that the Reformists’ (in this case, primarily Politicians) technology mandates will take us backward:

• Some of us, me included, have Luddite tendencies. I watch my more tech-savvy colleagues to see technology actually doing something that would benefit my teaching. Then I get interested in trying it myself. If I am mandated to use it for its own sake, then it is just one more burdensome requirement, to be used only as prescribed.
• In Idaho, if not in other states, the new laws dictate implementation of technology for its own sake. For example, as a new graduation requirement, students must take two courses on line. This is utterly without any reference to curriculum.
• It is guaranteed that such technology must not be used by a teacher as an instructional tool. The teacher is not even allowed to be in the room while instruction is going on.
• I fear that teachers who come up with new ideas to use technology to serve curriculum needs in their classrooms will too often be told “Sorry, we can’t afford it. The technology budget is all going to meet state mandates.”
• Because instructional software and services must be purchased from a state-approved provider, the curriculum will be at the mercy of that provider. I fear that we will be taken back to the bad old days when the textbook publishers effectively determined curriculum.

And, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”