I had to stop myself earlier today when I was commenting on Brandi's blog (Well Isn't That Peculiar) regarding a visit to her nephew's elementary classroom (where she observed seeing technology in action.) My "inner curmudgeon" started talking and it was going in this general direction:
"When I was that age, we didn't have cell phone, PDA's, wireless anything, laptop computers, or any other gizmos. We had books, pencils, paper, and we raised our hand when we wanted to say something, and we waited until we were called upon."
What my inner curmudgeon doesn't get is that what is going on in that classroom is way different from my elementary classroom - and I don't mean the technology. We never saw kids who had Assbergers or who had ADHD. The word inclusion was probably applied in a different situation. If you were a visual learner, tough. Here's the material - get busy. If you were lucky (and this is where I reveal my very nerdy past) you got to advance the film strip by turning the knob when the cassette tape beeped. I have no idea if the classroom that BDay talks about is the exception or the rule - but it sounds like a pretty good place to be.
I should probably say my inner curmudgeon is significantly older than I am. We sometimes believe the same things, but generally he's a kooky old guy who shakes his fist a lot while railing at the system.
The school I attended didn't really have computers until I was in the tenth grade. (Mr Iris did have a Heathkit computer that he put in a plywood box and attached to a console TV in the electronics room, but I don't really count that one because it worked about half of the time - and even when it was working, we just played a Pong-like game.) When we got to use them, we played hard - sometimes pre-programmed games, sometimes we were writing code - basic. The first successful program my friend and I wrote was a resistor color code calculator. (If you want to know what I'm referring to, click here.) You would enter the color codes on the resistor, and the program would give you the resistance value in ohms. I can't tell you how many hours we spent on it or how many misfires we had - but when we got it to work, we were amazed. Ah, the heady days of early personal computing.
I have a greater appreciation for programmers and app developers. I couldn't hope to tell you what the first step is to creating an iPhone app, but then again, a month ago, I couldn't tell you what I needed to do to create a blog - or why I would want to create a blog. Now I feel guilty if I don't feed my blog every three days or so. (Don't hold your breath for a Blam App anytime soon - but just don't rule it out completely.)
That said, this is my 20th year in education as a full time teacher, and my 23rd involved in educational theater. I was told, not too long ago, that I am considered "old school." That hurt. I don't use a chalk board - I have a dry erase board AND a Smart Board. That doesn't sound old school to me. I would be if I said something like "When I was your age, I didn't have dry erase markers and fancy electronic gizmos - we used chalk and slate and pencil and paper and that worked just fine." Except that we did have calculators, which we were told would diminish our mathematical capabilities, and computers that would demotivate us, and portable music players that would deafen us and rot our brains.
"When I was your age, a computer's OS was on a disk that you had to insert into the computer before you started it up; our calculators only displayed numbers; our music was stored on analog tape cassettes that could only hold 90 minutes of music." I think the student of 2010 would regard this statement just as old school as the student in 1980 would have regarding the pencil and paper remark. Certainly they laugh at the notions of the Apple IIe, the TI-30 and the Walkman.
In 2035, I suspect the curmudgeon would be saying "when I was your age, we used these things called iPods that held only two weeks worth of continuous music; we used our fingers to text and our personal learning networks weren't beamed directly into our brains. And in Bartlett Hall, the internet and TV needed cables to access." (OK, couldn't resist tossing that last one in.) I might be off with "Vulcan mind meld" PLN thing, but I'd be willing to bet I'll be close with the rest.
The one thing I won't do - honestly, it's because I can't do it - is try to think what would remove the "old school" label. I am who I am - but It won't keep me from trying to keep up with the technology.
Photo: http://www.rockcheetah.com/blog/images/statler-waldorf.jpg
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