I was treated to an e-mail the other day – I’m not sure why; it was offered as an “interesting teacher’s perspective.” I won’t quibble here with whether it is really the teacher or the perspective that I am to find interesting; I suspect the latter. I suspect too I would loath the teacher – though I guess that’s not to say she still might not be interesting.
The gist of the e-mail seems to be, taken from this person’s blog, that one, let’s call her Legion, takes great pride, when asked by a student for a pencil or a piece of paper, in refusing. Not for the reason I have been refusing the same request for years – that is, that you are to remember to bring to class every day the tools you will need to perform in that class. Just as you don’t expect the carpenter you hired to borrow some tools to put up those new cabinets, so too… you get it, right? No – this forward thinking educationist seems to see it as her place in life to remove paper, pencils, writing – that sort of outdated, outmoded, “in the box thinking” – and replace them with something better. She calls it “technology,” and wants to teach kids to use it “instead of paper to solve problems and organize ideas.”
Where to begin? First, “technology” does not solve anything, any more than “biology” cures diseases. But that’s petty. I shouldn’t expect her to be able to express herself clearly; she’s an educationist, fighting on the frontlines. She has bigger fish to fry than worry about clarity of expression. She is “responsible for sending good digital citizens out into the world.” (That’s become the cover-all, the phrase du jour, the El Dorado of contemporary education: “citizens of the world.” Modern teachers, those who are teaching for the future, are no longer satisfied with producing kids who can read, write, count, and think; nope – the forward thinkers, the teachers for the 21st century, are producing “world citizens,” sometimes even “digital citizens.” No matter that first phrase doesn’t really mean much, is either a tautology or, more probably, an impossibility). But I wander.
You cannot know how depressed it makes me to know that there is a colleague out there somewhere who thinks she is doing some children a favor by refusing to let them write something down, and pointing them instead to some digitalized, expensive, soon to be outdated piece of “technology.” And, while we are at it, that someone here closer to home thinks this is something I should be made aware of, might find interesting. This poor zhlub thinks she is doing education. God forbid we use paper to solve a problem or a pencil to organize an idea. It is, after all century 21 – and that’s what we should be educationalizing for.
