In the early 1980s, I was having breakfast with some of my new in-laws. One of them, Uncle Joe DaSilva, was a watch-maker. He had a little shop in a strip mall in Hempstead and he was contemplating his future. At one point he held up a $5 Casio watch and said, "Why would anyone bother to get a watch fixed?" He estimated there were maybe a few hundred such people left on Long Island -- those with an appreciation for finely crafted time pieces -- maybe a few thousand. A few weeks later he started stocking his little shop with inexpensive watches for sale so that he could stay in business.
At around the same time, my father was at the height of his career as a motion picture music editor and supervisor, recording and dubbing and cutting the music for large-scale musical films such as Hair, The Blues Brothers, and Amadeus. He was a master of the moviola, precise with his splice, but by the early 1990s those skills became, suddenly, useless as film went digital and he was suddenly having to learn anew how to do his job from people half his age. Soon he was relegated to laying temp tracks for TV movies.
I remember thinking I was immune from that kind of obsolescence because I'm a teacher and children will always need teaching and a machine cannot do most of what we do. I still believe that, though I wonder now if I'm not living in a false sense of security. I wonder if there aren't more ways than I am calculating in which we might all be made obsolete.
When I walk past a classroom full of bored students, and see some of those students seeking an escape on personal electronics, I wonder if at least some of these children would be learning more in front of a properly programmed machine.
When I see teachers not making an effort to understand very much about their students, especially the reluctant learners, I cannot help thinking that they are squandering the very thing that might, for good reason, make a living human teacher irreplaceable.
When I see teachers resisting change, refusing to recognize the changes around us, including our students, when I see teachers refusing to believe there is a place for technology in education and refusing to figure out how better to integrate it, then I fear we are asking to become obsolete.
When I was a community college student in the mid-1980s I had an English teacher who marked one of my papers down because I put only one typed space after each period. He insisted that two spaces were required. Aside from his pettiness, he was wrong. I was, by then, a published writer and informed him that editors and publishers no longer followed that rule, that one space was now the accepted practice. The teacher would not concede and seemed, after that, to vindictively and arbitrarily find fault with everything I turned in. I have never forgotten this man. He taught me more about teaching than almost anyone else.
It is my responsibility to stay current in my subject area and to always find new ways of mixing the rhetoric and literature of the moment with the vast expanse of the past. It is my responsibility to understand the newest technology and how it might be applied to teaching children.
Some children, at various times in their lives, may actually learn better from a well-programmed computer than from a person. We ought to recognize that and use whatever resources are available to help every child we can. On the other hand, we all -- teachers and anyone else who cares about children -- vehemently oppose the false idea that all children can learn better from computers and other technology. Those devices are tools for educators; they do not replace human teachers and I sure as hell hope they never do.
Even if the virtual classroom (which, at the moment, is still a pretty false idea) were to become the virtual reality classroom -- in which students, all wired up in their living rooms, meet in some manufactured reality on a computer server somewhere and each student has an ideal educational experience tailored specifically to his or her needs and completely interactive and with a dynamic and caring and attentive virtual teacher... what a horrifying possibility. Students might learn more content and skills, they might avoid the boredom and bullying and peer pressures of school, but would it be worth the alienation, the lack of true human experience?
Perhaps we are heading in that direction -- and if we are then it might be up to teacher, hamstrung as we are by shameful working conditions, to hold these Orwellian alternatives at bay by showing that we can do what machines can never do: care about children, empathize with them, and always find new ways (ways that those virtual reality programmers would never conceive of) to reach them and inspire them.
Maybe it's up to us to face the digital age and make sure humanity itself doesn't become obsolete.
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Students enter my classroom sometimes with little academic knowledge and even less in the way of reading and writing skills. Put them in front of a computer and there is much they can do but little, if any, would prepare them for college or work or participation in our so-called democracy. One thing I make sure they all learn in my class, in fact, is how to acquire information via the internet, how to begin to verify it and integrate it and how to begin to seek knowledge and not just amuse themselves. Among my goals, as a teacher, is to make myself obsolete with each group of students. When students in my senior classes begin critiquing me all the time and challenging me on every point I try to make and on the usefulness of every lesson I inflict upon them, and when they are able to do it in writing that is clear and effective then -- as annoying as they might be about it -- they are letting me know that I've succeeded.
Teaching is about much more than lecturing. It includes offering direction and assistance but ought to still go far beyond that.
I;m curious what it is you teach? One problem with education today is it is about spoon feeding information instead of critical thinking. Rather than have students come to their own conclusions we feed them the conclusions those before them have made (in regards with history and English).
One reason I hated English was because you were supposed to find an answer the teacher was looking for rather than make your own conclusion based on observation.
I completely agree with the use of technology and virtual lessons. The reason a teacher will have a job for the foreseeable future is because a computer can not answer the response of, "I don't get it".
But, of course, I do agree that it would be easier for teachers to embrace and integrate technology on a more consistent basis if the technology were more accessible to them. As long as our schools ask 25 teachers in a building to take turns using a single computer lab with 30 (often unreliable) computers, we will continue to see efficient/effective educators opt for a wiser (more consistent/dependable) use of their valuable instructional time/resources. I can't tell you how many times I've heard frustrated teachers lamenting the untimely demise of a planned lesson due to technology mishaps: the network was either down or too slow to support 30 learners at once, the lab reservation was pre-empted by newly required benchmark testing, the necessary software was missing or improperly installed, five of the computers were not fully functional (keyboard or mouse or monitor issues), etc. -- It's not that teachers don't want to integrate technology, it's that the technology has to be reliable and readily accessible.
Perhaps a school's inability to upgrade its technological infrastructure will, ironically, lead even more quickly to its reliance on flipped classrooms and virtual lessons, thereby shifting responsibility for various technological shortcomings from the classroom to the home instead.
My wife's school threw $250k into a web based app that allows teachers to submit grades and have them online, viewable to parents in a matter of minutes of submitting the grades.
Meanwhile the language department is sharing a laptop between 4 teachers. *smh*
As to your last point, it seems to me that a computer could be programmed to answer "I don't get it" a hundred or a thousand different ways. Or to ask a series of clarifying questions in order to answer a student. And this could be sold as a viable means of instruction -- leaving our students sort of where we are trying to get customer service or technical assistance by telephone these days.
It's not surprising that many don't care anymore. No one else does.
2) kids are not the bosses, stop giving them the control of the school and of your lives: they DO NOT know better with personal electronics.
Now, feel free to politicize it.
I think your most telling point is the experience you related of the lecturer who would not listen to your argument regarding periods. That event, or perhaps human encounter, has stayed with you to this day, and late adulthood. I doubt very much you would have been so deeply affected by an errant computer program. Teachers are adults that have a deep effect on the lives of our young people, and in some cases more profound that their own parents. I don't see that ever being replaced by a computer.
I think the sad thing is that such a topic should come to be covered in the first place. Someone seems to have forgotten that all this computer instruction was written by someone with teaching experience (I hope), and will at some point need to be revised by someone. Who will do this?
CMI or CML is ideal for instances of rote learning and recall based practice, but I hear that is a technique used only by the poorest of teachers. Better ones challenge and engage on an individual basis.
Perhaps you could devote another article to the topic of "How did we ever think teachers could be replaced by a machine in the first place". Over to you.............
Technology is something we at least need to be aware of. We need to understand how students are getting and sharing information. We need to understand what kinds of multimedia resources they have available to them, including those they can use to manipulate, synthesize and create with.
At the same time, technology is not a panacea, nor is it an end unto itself. As others have stated, it is a tool - one whose mere presence doesn't automatically improve the quality of teaching. As with any tool, you need to know how to implement it in order to make it meaningful.
I am enthusiastic about technology, but sometimes slow to adopt new methods. I am, however, in the process of integrating an iPad into my classroom, and exploring the benefits of wirelessly streaming media, etc. It all comes down to me picking and choosing from the smorgassbord of technological possibilities - finding the ones that seem interesting and/or meaningful to me and incorporating them. Had my administrators 'required' me to implement certain components (like powerpoints) I would have been much less enthusiastic.
As for the idea of teachers being replaced - We might as well start imagining schooling without schools. There is much more lost there than just human interaction with teachers. I don;t think technology will replace teachers, any more than digital arts have replaced painters or live musicians.
My students aren't willing to do real research. To them research is "I googled it." They are the generation of immediate satisfaction. If it isn't right there, many of them give up. Most of my students don't read books, and don't know how to do research in a book. I've had students tell me why should they read through a book looking for an answer or to do research when they can punch it up on the computer. Bang, its right their on the screen.
School is not only about learning facts. Its also about learning how to find the answers through research, and how to think.
I don't want my students to simply regurgitate information. I want them to think about the things they learn, and then ask their own questions, going further then I could ever take them in the classroom.
That is what really upsets me about these NCLB tests. All the students do is regurgitate information.
Memorizing random facts that a student won't remember 5 years from now isn't learning, and forcing students to memorize information because its on these tests isn't teaching.
You are right to suggest (as I suggested above) that many of us are hamstrung by our working conditions, but I disagree that every teacher is doing the best he or she can with what they are given -- and that we ought not ask ourselves if we can do better. Not every teacher in our system faces the kind of acute challenges you face.
Good luck.
But the day is coming very quickly when crooked politicians, prompted by crooked investors with something to gain, will say that teachers are obsolete and replace them, to the detriment of students. To some degree, that day is already here.
I give it a year or two before they start do something drastic. Until we have a plan in hand , there is no way we can overthrow this monster on Beaudry.