Teaching to the Touch Screens

I came into teaching at a pretty exciting time. The century had just turned, we were comfortably into a full

Who teaches who here?

assimilation of the Internet into daily life, and students were readily using Google and Yahoo to conduct research online. But early Internet nannies weren’t allowing them to view Mars Explorer because the domain name spelled “SEX” in the middle. Still some figuring.

Teachers were seeing that the kids already knew as much or more than they did, and many were resisting all of this “technology”—the term we still use for anything that, y’know, beeps and boops and crashes and freezes and we aren’t quite sure we fully understand and threatens EVERY ASPECT OF DECENT HUMAN EXISTENCE!

                At the time, us fresh-faced educators were being strongly encouraged to embrace these new tools, to learn them because they had awesome potential. The kids were adapting anyway, so may as well stay ahead of the curve. Most of us did. By the late 90s, being tech-savvy was a sure-fire way to get hired in everything from garbage collection to piano tuning.

                Flash forward a bit more than a decade and I’m an educator in the age of smartphones and tablets. High speed this, miniature that. Apps that unlock your car and set the seat warmer to “I just want to have a bottle of wine and cry.” The devices are small and powerful, they stun us with how quickly—daily it feels—the rules change, and there’s no longer a little paperclip to tell you how to do what it looks like you’re doing. Just a cold, greedy, soulless once-bitten apple, and a robot who looks scarily like a psychopathic extra from The Black Hole.

                We the teachers are still being encouraged to embrace, and we try. We are shown methods of bringing every form of device and application into the learning process. Much of this is wonderful and often useful rather than just trendy. Learning and its delivery are changing. I can text my students a reminder of their homework, I can create a website or blog of my lessons, I can chat in online rooms that are dedicated to me communicating with my kids and their parents all day and all night and all week and all year.

                We do it, we do it. We’re such great teachers because we’re teaching on the kids’ terms.

                BUT.

                There are cameras everywhere. In the locker-rooms, in the hallways. Kids are Snapchatting every time I turn my back to refresh my Activeboard. Altercations between staff and students are filmed and posted, out of context and out of control. Two kids can bait a teacher into losing her cool in class and a third can film, edit, and post the ensuing rant to the delight of millions. Zoiks! I didn’t sign up for this. How do we monitor every way we can be viewed and assessed and especially judged?

                Worse, the teachers who are the least savvy of social networks tend to suffer its backlash the most.

                I try to stay current. I Facebook, I Instagram, I blog. I’ve got like three clouds going, two sets of online documents, and a good half-dozen online personas. I don’t Snapchat, I don’t Vine, I don’t tweet. A student told me recently that she was tweeting about my classes—she sort of overblew how much it was all “trending”—and even though she meant it as a compliment to my teaching, I got a little uneasy. When you put it out there, it’s out there, and open to the world.  One of the biggest generational differences is how we view the Internet. I see it as the ocean: huge, sprawling, endlessly flowing. Awesome but potentially dangerous. The kids see it as a glass of water: sure there’s more out there, but I’m only worried about this little bit I have here.  

                We have entered an age where Millennials are now teachers. They are pretty darn good at keeping up with the kids, but they also appear to have the greatest issues with seeing the lines of the public and the personal. That’s the double-edged sword. The person who uses all these advancements in how we can interact with our learners appears to be the most susceptible to having issues removing the public from the private.

                Take Facebook. Let us just for a moment ignore the fact that this website has the most porous security system in the world, subject to retroactive and inane changes at the drop of a hat. Most teachers I know have a Facebook identity. Some of them are friends with students: former, current or both. Perhaps you can see the issues.

                -Make friends with a kid, you are communicating with a minor on a website where that kid will post and say anything, no matter how inappropriate. Even if you’re not being inappropriate, you’re still linked to that.

                -If you have a policy of only adding kids as friends once they’re adults, they are friends with minors still, and you’re connected to those minors via that newly-minted adult.

                -You don’t add any kids or their parents or their family dog as friends, but then a friend of yours takes a photo of you sucking the hose from a keg, tags you, and because you are—forgivably—unaware of the latest change of Facebook’s infamous opt-out security re-do (the one from five minutes ago), everyone with a pair of fingers and a search engine can see that friendship-ending Instagram share.

                Many teachers avoid Facebook, and then are told by tech-loving administration that it’s good to keep up with the kids. Others (guilty) create two Facebook profiles: public and private, but that doesn’t allow you to break the law, nor does it give you complete anonymity. Especially if you have the same friend on both.

                Point: we, your kids’ educators, are trying really hard to keep up with the world Steve Jobs put in fast forward. Our bosses and professional counsellors encourage us to learn about the newest website or networking site or whatever that sounds like it’s been named by a two year old. I’m really keen on it.

                BUT #2. A teacher has to be extremely careful about keeping private and public separate. This is difficult when you are “out there” in so many rapidly-changing ways. It’s worse when you’re being drawn, blinking and scared, from your deep, dark cave in which you have sworn you will remain forever oblivious, forever lost in a time when Christian Slater was a bankable actor.       

                Who we are and what we do are becoming one, and there are few professions where that may have as resounding an effect. 

Divided By Zero

Whenever I tell people that I’m a teacher I invariably hear, a) “I was a terrible kid—you would have hated teaching me,” and b) “There’s so much wrong with the education system. And kids these days are so lazy, entitled, and show no respect.”

                Everyone has gone through school, and for some reason that makes everyone an expert on the education system. It’s phenomenon unique to my profession. In learning how to drive a car, I never felt that I had acquired expertise on the finer points of internal combustion; I go to the hospital when I am injured, but I do not point out how I feel a surgeon can improve her methods; I enjoy a lobster once in a while, but I have no idea how to set, bait, or retrieve traps. You get the point.

                But because everyone goes to school, everyone is an expert on education. Sitting in classrooms for twelve years is apparently all you need to know about how education is implemented and modified. And because high school involves two groups that are more often than not despised by society at large for their laziness and pampered lifestyles (namely teens and teachers), when something controversial comes up, the reaction of the general public is often incomparably negative and inconceivably ignorant.

                When it came out last week that Edmonton Physics teacher Lynden Dorval had been suspended for not following his school’s “no zero” policy, the media pounced, and the masses leaped a foot in the air. It’s been everywhere lately, and the enraged surprise has me flabbergasted because none of this is new. Many school divisions have been using no zero polices, or something like them, for years. Dorval has just made a calculated decision—this was all done with intent—to bring it out fully to a public that may have been unaware.

                Unfortunately, because people are already experts on the education system, they attacked this with resounding ignorance, making no attempts to delve into the facts. If this were a Social Studies essay, they would have failed miserably. Bombardment! Facebook, Twitter, CBC Radio’s Unconventional Panel, Calgary Herald columnist Naomi Labritz—everyone has been shooting off their mouths, pens, and keyboards as to how the system is creating a bunch of spoiled brats who don’t know the meaning of working for results. All anyone has heard is “teacher fired for giving zeroes,” and it was picked up and sprinted with.

“Entitlement.”

“Rewarding laziness . . .”

“In my day . . .”

“In the real world . . .”

Dorval’s case hasn’t received the careful sort of analysis we would have our English Language Arts students use in approaching a character’s motivations. If you have heard the man interviewed, he’s not drawing a line in the sand with zeroes on one side and anarchy on the other. He has given his students every chance possible to get in late assignments, but at the end of the semester, if he doesn’t see the homework, zero it is. Personally, I agree with this approach. Dorval is 61, and the higher you go up the pension ladder, the more resistance you see to no zeroes, comment-based assessments, and floating due dates. He sounds like he has tried harder to bend than a lot of those more jaded by years in this profession—just not quite hard enough.

Is he being fired? I think he’s chosen to retire with a very loud bang.

Assessment For (as opposed to Of) Learning is not an “every kid wins even if she does nothing” philosophy, as critics in newspaper columns would have us believe as they dump buckets of dirt into clean wells.

School is there to teach first, to impart knowledge. It is a place for trial and error, so if a kid performs a task and the only feedback he gets is 7/10, where does he go with that? How does he improve? School does not exist only to “prepare kids for the real world”—that preparation comes from the combination and synthesis of the information they get from school, parents, and personal experiences.

And what is this “real world” that keeps getting preached, anyway? This “if you don’t do it and do it right the first time, you get fired” world where no one has even had a mother who loved him and every Boomer is the model of hard work and professionalism?

Is this the real world where we ask for extended deadlines on projects, knowing that the quality of the project trumps all? Is this the real world where you wait half an hour for service from a disinterested clerk in an electronics store? Is this the real world where you order your steak medium rare and get chicken? Do these people lose their jobs? Puh­-lease. I think you’re confusing reality with ideality—your ant-hill utopia doesn’t exist.

Overall, I have a pretty similar approach to Dorval. When every last chance has been exhausted, I do give a zero. But then, my school division doesn’t have a policy like his, so zeroes are a resort I have access to. That’s what they are, though, a last resort. I avoid giving marks as punishment. My job is not to punish, nor to teach that the only valuable pursuit is reward, nor to present kids with some dog-eat-dog depiction of a world that doesn’t exist. My job is to teach, to help kids turn themselves into people who can think for themselves.

Hopefully, they will learn to consider the facts of an issue before firing off an opinion on it, and accept that because they have experienced the results of a system, they may not be experts on how it works.