Teach, not Tech

A CNN article about a failed school experiment caught my eye. A group of administrators and educator-squirrel types were in a tizzy about their school’s tanking test scores. So they decided to go high-tech about it all and spent a king’s ransom on fancy-pants electronica for their classrooms. Interactive whiteboards, Facebook projects, computers for everybody, Internet everywhere, you name it. And guess what? The test scores stayed down in the basement. They didn’t budge by a scintilla of an iota.

My reply: well, duh.

I am well qualified to say “well, duh” to those nincompoops. My geek credentials are impeccable and stratospherically off the chart compared to the rank and file of academia. I designed and managed the SF Conservatory’s student computer center, relinquishing it to our fine IT folks only in 2006 when the Conservatory moved to its new building. For some years the Conservatory ran its entire student-registration office on software I designed. To this day we still offer my eartraining software to our students. Nowadays I’m doing a ton o’ work involving digital audio, including dubbing older recordings to new. I design websites—for my department, for myself, for the contemporary music group Ensemble Parallèle. I’m hell on wheels with zippy presentations that blend animations and music with spiffy graphic design and compelling content and eschew mind-numbing bullet points. I know my digital stuff and I know how and when to use it.

And knowing my 1s and 0s as I do, I am cautious about the use of digital technology in the classroom. I allow that modern presentation software and equipment can provide a good teacher with phenomenal tools for enhancing a class. I also allow that the same stuff in the hands of mediocre teachers is likely to dilute what piddling effectiveness those teachers already have. I suggest a simple qualification for any teacher who aims to use Keynote or PowerPoint presentations in a classroom: first require them to teach effectively without anything but a chalkboard/whiteboard. If they can do that, then in all likelihood they’ll be able to make creative and effective presentations. Or maybe they’ll decide not to bother since they don’t really need the whiz-bang. As long as they’re teaching effectively, it doesn’t matter whether their tool of choice is an LCD projector, a piece of chalk, or just a good loud voice.

I have absolutely no faith in computerized learning software. I ought to know; I wrote enough of it. And having authored some darn sophisticated eartraining applications, I know only too well how ineffective they are. It isn’t really the drill or the material that makes the difference. It’s the teacher that does it, the handing over of one person’s experience to another. Call it the “king’s touch” or the “laying on of hands” if you will. But ears are impacted only sluggishly, if at all, by a computer drilling program. You want eartraining magic? Put a qualified person at a piano beside a kid with a pencil and a sheet of manuscript paper.

Maybe it’s all about the physical. You have to get your hands dirty; you have to write it down yourself; you have to wiggle your vocal chords by talking; you have to sit there feeling your hiney get progressively sore; you need that slight frisson of anxiety that you might be called upon to recite. Maybe it gets down to something even more elemental: you can turn a computer off, but teachers don’t come with “off” switches.

Whatever it is, computers don’t have it. So while a pile o’ puters makes sense for a class on Photoshop, digital gizmos of all stripes are best kept out of student hands during instructional periods. Use technology where it helps: word processors, research, drawing, etc. But when it’s time to stretch the mind, incite the imagination, make the connections, the computers have to stay off. That includes the pads and pods and phones. Turn ’em off. Turn ’em all off. Oblige your students to watch, listen, pay attention, experiment, try for themselves, put their butts on the line in front of a real live person who knows the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad. There’s a world of difference between teaching and just merely handing out information. Computers are perfectly OK for the latter. They suck at the former.

Instead of spending fortunes on electronics, let’s spend the money where it counts: on teachers and teacher training. You want good education? Get good teachers. Pay them what they’re worth. Refrain from working them to death. Treat them with courtesy and respect. Stop plaguing them with administrative folderol. Support them rather than hemming them in with forms and folderol. Leave them alone and let them do what they do so well.

Do that and you’ll never miss those computers that you never needed.

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