what was missing from my presentation

The crowd is standing room only as I begin.  I'm Icarus soaring up toward the sun.  I'm powerful.  I'm respected.  No spit wads or hunks of paper.  No airplanes.  Just me, backed up with my PowerSlides set up with the Edison Projector.

I offer a give and take, asking critical thinking questions.  I see a few college students taking studious notes.  Who knows? They could be using their tablets for the pen pal networks, but I assume these are learning devices and perceive the nodding of the heads to be agreement rather than falling asleep.  

I offer a few bits of humor.  It's an easy crowd.  People expect safe, campy, cornball humor and so my sardonic, cynical musings seem, if nothing else, like a novelty.  The laugher jars me, because I was always the serious kid who sat silently in class.  I was always a little too grown up for my age and now I'm comfortable in my own age.  

I explain the relationship between social context (the dawn of a Progressive era, urbanization, the rise of industrialization), current educational theory (and its practice) and technology.  I mention, as a historical example, the Guttenberg Press meeting the rise of nationalism and the early educational theorist Erasmus.  I lock my hands together to show the Triple Convergence and how it is a catalyst for change.  

After talking about a New Pedagogy (which I cleverly refer to as Learning 4.0 just to prove that it is two steps ahead of being 2.0 and all the while feeling, in my gut that I'm still teaching at the Beta level), I offer the question, "as we move forward, what will we do to retain the voice from the past? How will we avoid the pitfalls of perennialism?" 

I explain my seven steps and show examples of student work.  

*     *     *

Paul the Pre-industrial Poet attends for moral support. I assume that supporting one's morals means boosting one's ego.  Wrong.  Paul pulls me aside and asks, "Do you really want to know what I thought?"

"Yup.  Let me know."  

"The slides were great.  The points were well spoken.  You wowed the crowd with a folksy style meeting just the right high vocabulary to prove your points.  The information was solid, too.  I think it got people thinking. But there was one thing missing."  

"What's that?" 

"Humility." 

"I'm not sure what you're talking about."  

"Look, seven steps.  These folks have had seven steps and four keys all day long.  Multiply seven and four and you have a perfect number and that's the problem.  It's all perfect.  But people are tired, real tired, and all the keys and steps are making them feel like janitors in a stadium and they're jumping on all these steps trying to hold onto the heavy key chain and watching the players strut around on the field. What are they supposed to do with all this?"

"So, what would you have done differently?" 

"Okay, you know how you say pencils are not the magic bullet? You just presented them as the magic bullet.  You showed the best student examples and told the most enlightening stories.  You advertised yourself and although the crowd felt entertained, where do they go from there? Fantasy land?  Tell some stories of failure.  Tell a story of a snapped pencil or a paper airplane.  Show a time when a student failed to get it and ask the crowd for advice. They might not be pencil geeks, but they are experts in some area." 

  

Paul is right.  So if I'm Icarus, I'm crashing toward the ground.  I'll be greeted with adoration from those who attended the workshop.  We might talk theoretical nonsense and I might move closer to the sun.  Or maybe I can stop pretending that I'm cutting edge and admit that the edge has cut me up pretty badly in the process.

Maybe I'll just be what I am - a guy who is lost in a quickly changing industrial world, a little scared and lonely and confused by the fact that I cannot see the stars a little too squeezed in by the sardine can compression of it all.  Maybe I'll tell a few stories of failure and engage in a conversation about being relevant without selling out.

do we need a phonograph in my classroom?

Last night, we gathered around a small fire in our back yard.  The necessity of warmth forces us to connect.  A few of our neighbors come by.  For all the talk of social networking, this is our true social network.  Before we had pen pal sites, we had fire pits and front porches and potlucks.

Earlier this week a representative from the district office pulled me aside and eagerly expounded upon a great pencil initiative.  It's not simply pencil-based, but multimedia.  Kodak cameras, phonographs, Edison projectors, perhaps even an instant connection to a telegraph.  "Tom, we're looking toward your classroom as the prototype for a Twentieth Century Classroom."

"That sounds really intriguing, but shouldn't we wait until the twentieth century so that we're all in the same century together. I mean it might be lonely in a classroom-based time machine." I responded.

He stared at me blankly.

"It was a joke," I tell him.  He offers a sympathy chuckle. It was a bad joke, but it was the best I had.  Just about every subject is taboo when talking to an edu-crat.

"So, look, we'll be adding a few phonographs in the next week.  We want to test some of this technology out on you first before launching the initiative." Something about this process leaves me feeling as though my students are the newest lab rats. I teach children, not data.  I always want to keep that distinction.

***

I spent a large part of my life in Kansas.  Everything is bigger and smaller when you can see the horizon.  Perhaps it's an optical illusion that the sun becomes massive.  I think it's an illusion that it was ever small in the first place.

We knew the land and the dirt and weather.  People have called it a simple life, but that's not exactly the term.  Life was complex.  Soil was complex.  We knew the names of most species that lived in our little ecosystem and our neighbors knew something of humanity that I've already lost.  I think you sometimes have to live in a smaller place to get a bigger picture.

So now our home is in a tiny enclave of a large urban center.  We can't see the stars.  My daughter will grow up without the freedom to walk out into a pitch-black night and stare into the universe.  I've heard that light pollution can cause animals to lose their orientation.  I wonder if that's what's happening to us. We start to believe that sky scrapers are larger than the very star that gives us life and warmth and light.

***

Phonographs, photographs and telegraphs present a subtle lie that life belongs on a graph.  Our neighborhood is an a grid, sending us electricity in promise of progress. It's less about progress than progression through compression.

Life on a graph is compressed.  A phonograph extracts sound that is meant for a concert hall and compresses it into a machine.  We lose a sense of the quality in exchange for portability and permanence.  The same goes for a photograph.  It's a two-dimensional, black and white replica of life. Or a telegraph - chop the information into patterns of beeps in exchange for instant messaging (teaching us the lie that the urgent is the same as the important).  For what it's worth, I have a hunch that the mind can produce permanent and portable images and sound, but it's intangible and untrustworthy.

The mind is mythology and pictures are prose, but I am convinced that truth is not always real and reality is not always true. If the twentieth century is simply more compression and portability and constant progression without ever feeling the connection to the land, I'm not sure that I'm fit for it.  If we are willing to exchange connection with one another for connection to to devices, then I think it's a Faustian exchange and I'm not sure I'm the teacher to lead this "cutting edge" reform. Especially when no one is asking "who and what are we cutting?" (Is it us? Is it information? Is it the land? Is it sound and space and time that we cut through?)

A couple of days ago, I saw my wife speaking softly into the mouth of a telephone.  She was at home, but she was somewhere else. Her hand gently held its mechanical mouth.  I don't fault her for wanting to talk to her parents, but in that moment, I was jealous.  It should have been my mouth she caressed and my lips she kissed.

A century from now, we'll probably have moving pictures at the palm of our hands.  We'll have instant messaging and we'll probably have a way to plug a tiny phonograph into our ears to hear thousands of songs. Life will be so compressed that people won't even have a reason to stare out into the stars or watch the son fall into the horizon or sit around a fire and tell stories.

when hardware fails

Mr. Brown walks into the supply room with a candle in his hand,"How does a school expect its teachers to use the Edison Projectors if the electricity keeps going out?"

"I know.  I not only don't have electricity, they forgot the paper shipment system updates, so my entire system of operating has crashed."

"Crashed? That's a bit extreme. Besides, operating system?  Really?  It's paper, Tom. It doesn't have to be a system."

"Good point, Brown." (If they insist on changing the name colleague with the word "teammate" then I'm going to call him by just his last name and drop the "mister" entirely.  Brown, for his part, has started bringing sunflower seeds and scratching himself.  If we're going to use a sports metaphor, might as well go all out.) "But it's impossible for the paper and pencil system to work when they won't do a few purchase order updates. What's the point of one-to-one pencil to student ratio if I can't keep things updated?"

"People ask me why I'm not switching over to pencils and paper and Edison Projectors and phonographs.  You know how often slates break?  Never.  You know how often I run out of chalk?  Never.  I keep a huge stash of it under my desk.  Chalk doesn't get old, so I don't do any updates.  It's cheap.  It's portable.  It's durable. Tom, it's an issue of taking care of hardware.  That's why schools don't have meaningful pencil integration."

"Perhaps.  Some day, I imagine there will be machines that make copies for you and I won't have to worry about whether kids have paper, because they won't have to copy information from the board. We won't see the human errors, because it will come down to pushing a button."

"Yeah, but think about this, Tom.  A hundred years from now, they'll have telegraphs in each school and people will be able to access information from around the globe.  Yet, the telegraph connection will break constantly.  They'll have copy machines, but the machine will jam daily and they'll forget to order paper for it."

For all the talk about teachers being motivated to use pencils, no one seems to address this issue.  A teacher isn't going to create phenomenal PowerSlides, if the Edison Projector might not have electricity.  A teacher won't create a true pencil-based lesson if the access to paper is unpredictable.  Teachers want to have some certainty that the hardware they use will work.  Few of them relish in the unspoken role of improvisational speaker meets babysitter meets handy man while a group of restless kids sit on their hands and wait to learn.

No one does this explicitly, but on a subconscious level, we become timid about integrating new tools, because we are never sure if the tool will work properly.  We plan a lesson but then plan a back up lesson or a backup of the backup and it makes us a little skittish. Like a carpenter with a wobbly-handled hammer, we know that tools in schools are often unpredictable in their failure and in becoming overly careful, our students miss out on a full education.