Anyway, obviously lots to catch up on as far as the teaching goes. Like, I'm teaching now. And even thought I've been waking up a little before 5 most mornings, and not getting home from school till about twelve hours later, and then often doing work at home. And work this past weekend. Despite all that....I'm kind of having a blast. I'm encouraged in thinking I could have this job for a while.
I'll have to talk in more detail about my first week at West Meck, but it's getting near my bedtime and I'd like to finish my PBR and retire soon. However, I'm going to cheat and copy-paste in something I just wrote for UNC. I'm getting this Masters of Arts in Teaching over the next two years, primarily (if not entirely) through online coursework. The first course involves reading a text book I haven't bought (and am trying not to) and writing posts on a discussion board. THis last discussion topic though gets me a little heated, so instead of the paragraph I probably should have stuck with, I wrote the following:
As I've intimated in my responses to others' posts already, I fall on the skeptical end of the spectrum when it comes to technology and education. Of course I agree that our students need to be able to function in a world increasingly reliant on technology, particularly for the purposes of information gathering and digital communication. But beyond being able to create a word document, send an email and find reliable information on a search engine, I think a lot of times technology becomes something people push us to teach because it sounds nice and advanced, when really there are a million other things we could be spending time teaching that would better help our students develop into thoughtful, intelligent and creative adults.
Technology allows us to manipulate information: we can search for it, type it, put it in a spreadsheet, send it in an email, present it in a power point. And the ability to do those things is undeniably a useful skill. What technology does NOT do, however, is create new ideas. It can be used to make certain ideas manifest (creating digital models, running simulations, making digital art, etc.), but it doesn't teach people the creative, critical thinking skills needed to come up with those ideas in the first place.
I think the last thing responsible for the pathetic state of our public education system is a lack of technology in classrooms. Technology is great for many things, but it does not create literate students. It doesn't teach kids how to think about big ideas. It doesn't teach them to think creatively. It teaches kids how to find bite-sized pieces of information quickly, collate them tidily into a word document or spreadsheet, and then spit them back out in bullet points on a power point slide. Data manipulation is not learning. It can be a useful supplement to learning, but beyond that its utility begins to wear thin.
Our public education system is a wreck. When something is in that sorry of a state, you need to prioritize. Priority number one should be teaching kids to read and write. The horrifying lack of those skills is what's crippling our kids, not their inability to create an interactive web page. Priority number two should be teaching kids to think about what they read and write. They might be able to make the snazziest multimedia presentation ever, but if they have no meaningful thoughts to present, it becomes fact-regurgitation jazzed up with some video and a colorful background. Priority number three should be teaching creativity. Not just artistic creativity (although, as a former art teacher, I'll argue to the death about the importance of that), but out-of-the-box thinking in all the disciplines.
That said, I absolutely think that the first two elements of the report are pretty solid: content and learning skills. Absolutely. I'm just wary of any new educational direction that seems to focus more on technical skills that are relatively easy to learn on your own (my Nana has managed to figure out instant messenger and Skype), and focuses less on those aspects of education that require development over time and provocative, authentic teaching. Not that you can't be a terrific teacher and use technology - a power point can be very handy for certain things, particularly when teaching 36 kids - but UNTIL you are teaching real content and real critical thought, technology will be a diversion and a short-cut.
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