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.

phonograph man and the geeky gurus

A man rides his carriage up to the playground and stops the horses.  He pulls out a hand-cranked, ultra-portable, larger-than-the-cosmos phonograph.  It's not a pretty piece by any means.  Far from Mozart, it is a repetitive drum beat and a song with some choice words that the average primary grade student doesn't use (Indeed, it was a bit of a shock to the kindergarten class whose idea of "dirty language" is poopy face and stupid head).

I suppose his main goal involved impressing five and six year olds, not by creating his own innovative music, but by blasting a record loud enough for everyone to hear. On some level, his plan worked.  The little tikes found the phonograph to be an almost mystical experience.  Then again, they are also intrigued by the notion of Santa Claus and four square and playing jacks.

A student points out to me, "Knowing how to use technology doesn't mean you know how to use it," and he says it just like that, italics and all.

I ask the students to set down their pencils and pose the question, "What does it mean to know how to use a medium?"  From here, we discuss the loss of silence in our world, the humming sounds of industry and the choking clouds of soot from the factories.

"So, I can do more, but I'm so rushed that I don't have time to do anything," a girl explains.

"Everything is compressed," a kid says.  "We pack more into it, but we lose the quality."

"Can you elaborate on that?"

"I can take a picture and it's portable, right?  But it's not as good as a painting.  I can listen to music on a phonograph, but it's all scratchy.  We have some motion pictures, but they're choppy.  People are now eating canned meat and it's processed and has the texture of jelly."

I want my students to be geeks and gurus. The geek is knowledgeable about technology.  This person loves it, embraces it and knows how to use it in creative ways.  One the best days, the geek thinks of the future and how technology can be used to solve social, economic and perhaps even personal problems. On the worst days, the geek becomes intoxicated by the novelty and applies futuristic solutions that lack foresight.  Or, the geek is simply a guy on a wagon with a really loud phonograph, imposing his narcissistic desires on the world.

On the other hand, the guru is wise about technology.  This person sees it as a force that is sometimes negative in its dehumanizing aspects.  On the best days, a guru will remind us that the physical is as important as the mechanical and that some things in life should not be chopped into pieces and processed, compressed and then industrialized. A guru knows that, even when we try and predict it, technology takes on a life of its own. However, on the worst days, a guru will grow cynical and angry and shake an elitist fist at every innovation while missing out on the ways technology improves society.

I want my students to be a bit of both. Call it a paradox or a mystery.  I don't want them to abandon technology in a doom-and-gloom fear.  However, I also don't want them to get into the mentality that a robotic world will fix everything.