TeacherScribe

If you have followed this blog at all over the past three years, you know I have been critical of our school. I don’t do this just to rant, though. I truly care about this place and the kids here. That is one reason I get so down on this place sometimes. I care and I want this place to be what it can be. I hate to see all of us settle for what it is at times.

I had the pleasure of serving on a committee to interview superintendent candidates with two of my students. At one point, one candidate asked the students to tell her about their experiences at Lincoln.

They talked about how proud they were to be part of the school and its traditions. Both students had siblings who attended her and did great things. They commended the community for the support they felt as students of Lincoln.

It made me proud to work here.

I don’t think we hear enough from the students.

Now I know you could talk to several other students and get just the opposite reaction, but these kids really made me proud to be their teacher.

While I was thinking about this and the type of kids we have hear, I noticed that some students had set up a fundraiser for one of their classmates who has been diagnosed with leukemia. The students were selling T-shirts to support their friend. One hundred percent of the profits went to the student and her family. I overheard them say that they had already sold close to 200 T-shirts.

I think that too speaks volumes of the kids we have here.

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One of the superintendent candidates said something that really intrigued me at her interview: “We have to catch up to the kids.”

I like that idea.

Too often we think of students having to catch up to us in terms of curriculum and core knowledge. That might be true. But I think in terms of technology, real world skills, multi tasking, and being entertained, we absolutely have to catch up to the kids.

Now, I know several people will shake their heads at having to entertain kids in school. I am probably one of those. But those are the kids we have created. If you can’t entertain them and keep them laughing or intrigued, you have lost them.

I am reminded of a quote Alfie Kohn used in a past article, “The best way to get information from the teacher to the students’ tablets without touching their brains is to lecture.”
We can’t just teach the way we were taught in high school or even in many of our college classes. Professors don’t have to worry about AYP or test scores, so they can force the students to suffer through their classes.

We don’t have that luxury.

I think of my new College Comp II class. You want to talk about a Who’s Who among gifted students.

I find myself working twice as hard just to keep up with them. This means reading more articles than I ever have before to hit them where they live – technology and entertainment.

I wish you could just sit in on a class. When I turned them loose the other day, I overheard some kids contemplating physics and math formulas. I’m not making that up. Another day, we had an informal discussion on science fiction literature.

What a group.

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I found an MIT lecture series featuring Thomas Friedman on my ipod. Friedman is discussing his novel The World is Flat. I then shared his ideas with the students. I can’t imagine the world they will work in. It doesn’t even exist yet. But it’s coming.

That is the key message of Friedman’s book. I like what he used to tell his daughters: “I used to tell them at dinner to finish their vegetables because people in Asia were starving; now I tell them to finish their homework because people in Asia and India are starving for their jobs.”

I think that threat is all too real.

He focuses on ten things that helped flatten our world. Here is a quick synopsis of the top four and how they affected the world and my little place in it.

1. 11/9/89 – the fall of the Berlin Wall came down and the liberation of the old Soviet Empire to capitalism. He also notes that it is no coincidence that five months later Microsoft’s Windows shipped. The wall came down and the windows went up. Not only was capitalism spreading but now there was an operating system like never before.

2. 8/9/95 – maybe the biggest flattener of all, the date Netscape went public. I can still remember the first time I ever went online right around 1996 or so. I had an education class focused on inculcating technology into the classroom. Our professor took us down to the computer lab, which I had only ever used for word processing, and had us get on the internet and search until our heart’s content. Life has never been the same. Think about it, whether it’s email or just surfing the net, how many days have you NOT been online? Here was the beginning of a web browser that fundamentally changed people’s lives. It was not long before I discovered Amazon and began to find all of my favorite books just a click away. I found homepages that were devoted to my favorite teams and subjects. All routinely updated and freely accessible whenever I wanted. No more hurrying home from work to catch NFL Live or sitting through Sportscenter hoping to catch John Clayton’s “Inside the Huddle.” Now, it was all on espn’s home page. For free. Even today, a little over 13 years later Netscape is old news, but google has wormed its way into our every day vernacular. “Google

3. Work Flow Software – This was powered by the PC movement and Windows. This allowed everyone in an office to run a program that allowed them to all work together and share information instantly. Imagine going from handwritten files or using type writers that were painstakingly slow (well, painstakingly slow compared to computers and email). Once Microsoft began overhauling the computer programming services of entire offices and companies, suddenly workers could share data and content effortlessly, as long as they all ran the same programs. Now this did not happen over night, but once it caught on, it fundamentally changed how businesses operated and how information was shared. Instead of typing up a document in book keeping and taking it up to accounting or personnel, the document could be typed in Word and sent via email instantly to accounting and personnel. It sounds like a small change, but having typed several of my early college papers – and spending hours doing it – being able to manage data on a computer and saving it to a disk (albeit a large floppy disk) and being able to take it to another computer in another building or city and being able to open it back up and work on it just as easily was a total revelation for me.

4. Standards on top of standards – once such standards as HTML or HTTP or PayPal or JPEG were set up, the information really began to flow. Companies stopped competing over various systems and started focusing on improving interchangeable content. Look at what PayPal can do. Anyone with a PayPal account and an email address can send money to anyone else with a PayPal account. Just look what PayPal did for ebay. Amazon has not caught up with that yet. Whenever I bought something from Amazon in the past, I had to use a credit card (itunes still functions this way – they must get some form of kick back from the credit cards for this), now they do allow me to use my checking account. However, buying something – or selling something – on ebay is easy because to do so you can use PayPal (like an online banking system). It’s heavily protected and it allows me to choose how I would like to pay for something I bought on line (mostly from ebay but there are other online stores that use PayPal). From my PayPal account I can pay for an item using a credit card or my bank account. And the service is free. Just imagine how simple things will be when itunes, amazon, and any other online store adopts PayPal as its payment process.

Thanks to the JPEG standard, we can send digital pictures or post them to any and all relatives for free. I remember when Mom and Dad had an instant Polaroid camera – you know the kind that spit the picture out and you had to shake it while it developed. I thought that was damn near magic when I was a kid.

Well, those days are forever gone. Now every single cell phone has the ability to take a picture and develop it instantly. Every single cell phone stores that picture as a JPEG or TIFF or whatever digital format is in fashion. Years ago you had to either wait for relatives to visit in order to show off your Polaroids (or else send them via the US Postal service, which could take quite a bit of time). Now, though, I can take a picture of Kenzie on my camera and email it to anyone (or send the picture right to their phones). I can download the picture in seconds and have it posted on my blog in a few more seconds for any distant relatives to instantly see.

Even now, Kristie took a great picture of Kenzie during her lunch break. She sent it to my phone, but it’s dead. So I had her email me the picture. I saved it to my desktop. This allows me to send it instantly to all relatives with an email account. Or I could post it on my blog for anyone to see. All in the matter of no more than a minute. Just imagine what businesses can do with this type of efficiency. That’s how we get McDonald’s that take a picture of you when you’re in the drive through and then take your order which is sent instantly to someone sitting in their home on their computer taking and managing your order. Then they send it back to the MacDonald’s so the worker can then get your order, match it up with your picture to ensure accuracy. It also explains why Indian accountants did tax returns for about 400,000 Americans last year. All electronically. All because Indian accountants work for a fraction of what American accountants do.


Now, most of this efficiency has happened in the past five years. Imagine what the next five will bring. That’s the world we need to prepare our kids for.