PJ's Draft

PostPosted: Fri Aug 05, 2005 8:30 am   Post subject: rough draft 	Reply with quote Back to top

PJ's Draft

The ice industry of the 1890's and 1900's thrived in large cities. The ice house employees would pack up their wagons every day, shoo the children away in the summer, and collect the price for the ice. Yet, by the 1920's, their days were numbered. Fearing for their jobs, they saw the way of the future: people would soon no longer need ice. They thought that people would no longer need them. Thinking their job was to deliver ice was the mistake of their security. Their real job was not to deliver ice, but to keep food cold. If they had made only that one little alteration in their thinking, names like Westinghouse, and GE might now carry a name like Strodanovitch or Robinski. We teachers are on the lvan-side of the wave of a new paradigm shift in which each of us is being expected to choose to embrace or become an ice man of old. Each teacher is being asked to think in new ways. Each teacher and administrator is being asked to move with this new pardigm or be guilty of passing children with insufficient skills for the world we now live within.

Talented, assertive, wonderous teachers currently populate the profession. Their years of knowledge from things like KWL charts, literature circles, think alouds and SQ3R and how to use them to bring along below grade-level readers is something our profession can not do without. We need these thousands of highly qualified, highly trained, and highly motivated teachers to stay within the teaching profession. In the middle schools I've taught in, I've found teachers to serve as my mentors for their skills and their knowledge of both Reading and English - that marriage of both which is Language Arts. Yet there is a knowledge that the road is shifting. In an era of NCLB, of tighter budgets, of Texas Robin Hood, of changing standards, many are feeling like the Ice Man of the 1920's.

One must first evaluate the job in order to understand all that we are and will become as teachers. There are two views to the question of what it entails to teach. The first is that our job is to teach our subject matter. This is not only the easy answer, it is the answer of "to sell ice." The second viewpoint has two parts, first, it is our job to teach students to think. The second part is just as powerful. It is our job to teach students to think well enough to be prepared for the world. The days of trying to provide our students with all the background knowledge we feel they should have are a luxury we can not afford to dwell upon. Instead, we need to take the initiative and learn the current background knowledge they are living with in order to ensure our charges are capapble of rational, productive thought and literacy in a digital world.

The term "digital world" is a term of fear for many teachers and administrators. It's one fraught with opportuities to bemoan the lack of money or lack of budget or lack of skills. It is one where fear dominates by making teachers appear to be uncaring about technological aspects of individual disciplines, disinterested in learning new methods, and critical of the tools for the digital world that has evolved. It is a fear which turns to cries of 'I don't like computers, they don't like me, it's too hard to learn, I don't feel I should have to change how I teach, and I only have one." In his book Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer recounted a story of a shop teacher who became ever more estranged from his principal because his administrator wanted him to attend a summer technology institute. Finally, the teacher came to his principal and said "I still don't want to go to that institute, but now I know why. I'm afraid I won't understand it, afraid my field has passed me by, afraid I am a has-been as a teacher." There is no way this teacher was a has-been. Yet it was not because he decided to attend a workshop, but because he cared enough about his students to work at learning something new.

Not all teachers are self-reflective enough to come to such truthful conclusions. Indeed, at a school district meeting of middle school department chairs and Literacy Leaders about a year ago, several other chairs and leaders were talking about computer labs and reading labs. One woman whom I had met several times before sat and folded her arms over her chest, crossed her ankles under her chair and said with no small amount of vehemence in her voice, "I refuse to go into the lab unless there is a technician in there. It's not my job to teach these students how to use a computer. Furthermore, I resent that I have to keep two gradebooks just because I now have to upload one online." I was floored. I was also angered and felt quite proud of myself for walking away. Yet, time and time again the image of that scene has replayed itself and I have tried very hard to understand it.

This teacher was brilliant in her field. She was the department chair and had a love of books and reading and teaching which was second only to her own deman of intellectual rigor in keeping abreast in her field of Language Arts. It was not until I attened the Summer Institute with the National Writing Project that I came to understand that the one thing she could not do was to admit her fear of technology. Her very body language exuded it. Her closed eyes betrayed her closed mind, and her closed arms warded off any possible defense against which she spoke. She is not alone. Day after day teachers in all the disciplines find the excuses which say one thing but mean another. They say "I have ice to sell," without ever realizing they should be saying, "I will keep your food cold, I will teach your children for the new world we all live in, and show them new ways in wich to be literate."

I could be positive and say that the numbers of teachers who will not expose themselves to technology are dwindling. I could say the sun is shining and answering your email and chatting within your school is all you need, but I would be doing everyone a dis-service. I will readily admit that there are teachers who understand what is going on out there, Tech Liaisons with the national Writing Project, mentor technology teachers, Humanities teachers, science and math teachers all over the nation who are doing amazing things with their classes in the fields of digital literacy. Teachers for whom fear threatens respond with 'but they know it, and I don't" and they would be right. However, these successful teachers are connected to what is going on in the digital world around them because they decided that the investment of their time and their energies would best suit their profession and their students. Moreover, they are too few to be able to pull the rest of us through without some help from below. It is time to stop fearing change and embrase it with all the professional discourse that has always been the shining hallmark of professional educators.

It is time to reinvent our jobs, relearn our pedegogy, and reenergize ourselves to be that highest title of all, "teacher." If every school tomorrow simply spent one week learning about Wiki's, I have no doubt that by next week, thousands of involved, invested, excited students all over the country would be collaborating on everything between the meaning of the word "manizzle" to what is the best skate-board to buy and why. All this is literacy. If every school tomorrow simply spent one month exploring digital story-telling, I have no doubt that by next month every family of every student would be talking and bragging about how their story is going to be published. This too is literacy. Fear has no place here.

The one thing I have witnessed time and time again are teachers who apologize for not knowing more about computers or programs The statement I make most to these teachers is, "don't worry about it." I can not describe to you the joy I would feel, the joy all technology mentors would feel if a fearing teacher were to say "get out of my chair, but stand there and show me, again and again and again until I understand how it works." Even the most timid can go on line, find a blog of an educator who has students responding to one another's writings, and reply in turn, even contact that educator who likely resides half-way across the country. Fearful teachers can do all this and more, if they only move past fear. There are other ways as well, principals need to hear demands for futher training and access again and again, until even he or she is wondering why the teachers at their school are not publishing on line. Change is frightening. Fearing to not be smart enough or recall the steps is daunting. The only real solution is to play.

Every teacher knows in their soul the importance of that 1000 hours of lap-time for every child. Every teacher understands the empirical necessity of play time. Yet these same teachers forget that they too need chair-time, and play-time in order to feel comfortable with the technologies which surge through our lives and capture the imagination of our charges. It is the personal investment of commitment and time which will surely keep the fear at bay and eventually cool the dragon, not on ice, but into the new feezer. We must know our job.

As teachers we must lay aside our fear and embrace the very things which we find threatening and fearful. As wonderous as as a digital world may be to our charges, it can be frustrating and seemingly beyond our own control. I recently attended a professional writing retreat with about twenty or so other teachers, all of whom were vested into using technology. Yet even we had difficulties with equipment. The difference is that we do not let it stop us from understanding how things work in the effort to bring that knowledge to our students. As teachers, we need to redefine our profession. Are we in the business of having students line up and raise their hands and read district purchased primers, or are we in the business of educating children in a modern world? Only by reflecting upon the reasons for the excuses why technology is not utilized more, then getting beyond that excuse to excize fear will teachers again be the innovators of learning.