Category Archives: Television

On Leveraging Technology: part one of several–some background

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Books, Education, Life in the Classroom, Literacy, Parent Involvment, Television, Web/Tech

This year I have more technology in my room than I have ever had in fifteen years of teaching. I don’t know how I feel about it. The phrase in my district is “leverage technology.” I like this quite a lot, especially in contrast to the experience my own children are having in a different district. My children’s district decided to go one-to-one. Technology immersion, seems to be the tactic. It has been a rough transition. As a parent who has used technology mindfully, and been very deliberate about my kid’s exposure to technology, seeing my child use it all the time because he “has to for school” is unnerving. I want to spend some time analyzing these two approaches, and see what I can figure out (if anything). But this post is just background, the setting of the stage.

My early mantra around technology for my personal life and for my classroom was: technology must enhance what I’m doing not distract me from it. I’m not convinced we’ve figured out how to do this in education, as a system. I’m mostly positive a few individuals have figured this out. I’m in the process.

I want to be clear: I am not anti-technology. I coupled my English major with a computer science minor and used contractor jobs building websites to help pay off my student loans. Though I write often in a notebook, all my writing eventually is on a computer. I did resist a cell phone for years, mostly because I didn’t want something else to carry. I teach and have taught hybrid and fully online classes for years. Though, my family hasn’t owned a television in fifteen years.

I am of an age where I can remember the world pre-internet, as I’m sure many readers of this blog are, but I mention it because watching the web come into being taught me something about how I would use it. I lost friends to computers. They just became more interested in the machine and then we spent less and less time together. Nothing too serious, or out of the ordinary coming-of-age stuff, but I noticed. Then, in college, I read Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, and, being the serious minded young person I was, I thought hard about both the messages I received and the medium through which I received them.

Then I started teaching. I’ve had varying access to technology over the years, and I’ve used much of it. I’ve had a bank of computers, a smartboard, a small cache of laptops (webbooks they were called). But as the technology wore out, I did not feel a pressing need to replace it. It provided a way to do things, not necessarily a better way—as far as I could tell. Besides, a computer lab full of students, oddly silent, staring at monitors creeped me out. I only did it when it made sense—typing final drafts, et. all. Continue reading →

Put Down Your Phone and Pick Up Your Room

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Elementary, Life in the Classroom, Television

I’ve been reading a lot lately about children and adolescents and young adults having trouble managing their behavior and emotions.

  1. Psychology Today had an article “Crisis U” about the rise of mental health issues, particularly anxiety, in college students. Many students haven’t had to deal with much disappointment in their first 18 years. “In their overparented, overtrophied lives, many have not learned to handle difficulty.”

Simple frustration becomes a trigger for overwhelming emotional responses. “For increasing numbers of students all across the United States, disappointment now balloons into distress and thoughts of suicide. Lacking any means of emotion regulation and generationally bred on the immediacy of having needs met, they know no middle psychic ground: Mere frustration catapults them into crisis.”

Over-exposure to social media sets up unrealistic expectations. If everyone posts just happy, smiling pictures and glowing reports of vacations and accomplishments, then what is wrong with me? Older adults generally have more perspective than college students about their peers’ public personas and their private lives. Kids can feel like abject failures just by looking at their phones.

Unrelenting competition, both to get into preferred schools and to maintain the desired GPA, is another issue. A solution from Psychology Today? Stop grading on a curve. (I was lucky enough to have teachers and professors who gave out the grades we earned. We could all get an A. Alternatively, we could all get an F. On the other hand, if we all got an F, our profs realized their teaching was at fault. They were willing to come back and reteach, even in my college classes. That attitude has informed my instruction throughout my career.)

  1. Nina Parrish’s Edutopia article on “How to Teach Self-Regulation” provides tips to teachers on how to move beyond instructions in academics. Her exhortation to observe problem behavior with the goal of figuring out why it is occurring and their addressing that behavior once the child has cooled down really resonated with me. I confess I don’t manage to do that all the time. I’m still working on it!

She also recommends setting clear expectations and overtly teaching study skills, which I start from the first week of school. On a side note, virtually our entire teaching staff went to the AVID training in Seattle this summer, where we were inundated with the power of focusing on study skills.

  1. NPR’s piece “Why Children Aren’t Behaving, And What You Can Do About It” claimed we face “a crisis of self-regulation.”

Even for younger school children, their access to technology and social media is a culprit. For one thing, there is too much seat time already for students K-12. If they go home and spend endless additional hours on the computer, on the phone, or in front of the TV, that’s exacerbating an already existing problem. Young kids can have the same reactions as older, college students as they see that everyone else’s life looks perfect on social media. They can stress about what is wrong with them, or what is wrong with their family. Finally, news reports tend to focus on the negative. If young children watch the news, they see everything that is wrong with the world at a point in their lives when they can do little to effect meaningful change. It can contribute to a “mean worldview” vision of the world, and can leave them feeling out of control.

Lack of play is another issue. Not having time to play is a big part of the problem. Then not having unstructured playtime is another. In my school last year we were down to two recesses a day and PE two or three times a week. I would love to give kids PE every day and three recesses a day: morning, noon, and afternoon. Budgets and master schedules and limited numbers of specialists make my wish list impossible, at least for now.

So here’s what I can do. At parent conferences in the fall, inevitably I have parents who tell me that they require their child to get their homework done immediately after school. Only then can they go out to play. I always say, “Please don’t do that. By the time your children get home, they have been working for hours at school. They really need to go outside and run around before they sit down to do more work. Besides, we have such short days here. I’d like the kids to get outside in the sun as much as possible.” Parents and students both seem to relax once I say that.

The last point from NPR had to do with chores—any household job that children do to contribute to the well-being of the family as a whole. If kids aren’t pitching in, they are “underemployed.”

It’s part of the work of the family. We all do it, and when it’s more of a social compact than an adult in charge of doling out a reward, that’s much more powerful. They can see that everyone around them is doing jobs. So it seems only fair that they should also.

I have to say, I found this argument to be highly persuasive. Translated into the classroom, I like the idea of “we do the work to keep the classroom clean and organized because we are all part of the community” so much better than “we do the work just because Mrs. Kragen gives us a reward.”

Of course, I grew up doing chores. I had to clean my room every Saturday morning before I could watch TV or play—put all my stuff away, dust, and vacuum. (I took forever to get that done each week. I was not an organized child.)

As soon as we were done with our bedrooms, we had to do an inside job: dust the rest of the house, vacuum the rest of the house, clean the two bathrooms, or mop the kitchen floor. I always had last pick. I finally complained to my mom. She said the first person down got first pick. Oh.

Then we had an outside job which could be anything from sweeping the patio to helping put up a fence. We did get paid 50 cents or so for the outside jobs.

I tell my students about that regimen, and they act as though my parents were committing child abuse. Many of them have no chores at all. They think they shouldn’t have any. (I wonder if their lack of chores fosters a sense of entitlement.)

At our Curriculum Night next week, I’m going to share this article and suggest to parents they might want to institute some “household jobs” with their own families!

“Jersey Shore” is not real.

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Current Affairs, Education, Life in the Classroom, Literacy, Social Issues, Television

Images

No, I'm not kidding. It isn't real. Those people auditioned, were hired, relocated into that gaudy house, and then filmed. The episodes aren't real, either… No, I'm not kidding. Those episodes are edited together based on a storyline the writers create by putting The Situation and his crew into situations where the writers know how they will react. It isn't "real."

It is amazing how much convincing it has taken to prove to my freshmen that the Jersey Shore is not real. These are the same kids who have no problem suspending disbelief long enough to just accept that Peter Parker can climb walls when he wears the right spandex suit but who cannot just accept that the animals on Animal Farm speak English and build a windmill.

These conversations help to illustrate a critical shift which ought to be happening in literacy instruction in American schools: rather than studying literary works, we need to be studying literary processes.

  • We need to study the process by which 360 hours of Jersey Shore footage gets edited down to 44 minutes for a one-hour weekly episode.
  • More importantly, we need to understand the process of acculturation and normalization which occurs in a viewer when they watch entertainment labeled as reality.
  • We need to study the process by which lighting, angle, score and juxtaposition are used by news organizations to communicate a message beyond the news.
  • More importantly, we need to study the subtle and not-so-subtle biases which shape the decision-making about what makes air and what doesn't.
  • We need to help young readers learn to discern which sources on the internet are valid and which are not, and even what we mean by "valid."

Are these lessons more or less important than Shakespeare or great novels and poetry?

As with the television news, whose producers must pare hours upon hours of worthy news into 20-22 minutes of air time (including sports and weather), when we must choose what literacy lessons to keep and what to cull for our limited amount of instructional time, on what should we base that decision?

 

Someone Please Give the Whole Story

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Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy, Social Issues, Television

CddunUBy Mark

I am just old enough to remember Paul Harvey, and the "rest of the story."

Eve Rifkin, at our Arizona partner Stories from School has helped flesh out the "rest of the story" on that annual USNews "Top Schools" list, and it is as if she was reading my mind.

Between Waiting for Superman, Oprah, Education Nation, Obama's charge to raise the bar, and the resulting present (and I pessimistically argue ephemeral) empassioned focus on education in this country, it is clear that the whole story has not been told in far too many instances. Here is my take on the untold halves of the many stories told in the last couple of weeks…the rest of the story, if you will:

1. Unions oppose merit pay not to protect lazy teachers but because no one can come up with a fair and reliable way to assess teaching "merit." Issue number one: test scores don't work because not all teachers are in tested disciplines.

2. Those other countries who post great education stats? Their systems are different than ours. Some screen out special education kids. Some have separate vocational tracks which are conveniently not part of their data. Many in those systems lament the fact that the kids they produce are test-takers, not thinkers.

3. Weighing myself will not make me lose weight…I've being weighing in for years and the number is only going the wrong way. Testing kids more will not make them learn. In fact, testing actually takes up instructional time, the loss of which not surprisingly has a negative effect on test performance.

4. American schools held up as models of success always have the following by comparison to the mainstream: extra funding or an enrollment screen or both. These models are neither replicable nor sustainable in other schools unless those schools also get extra funding or an enrollment screen or both. 

5. Every child can learn, but not every child will. To blame that solely on teachers or on students is yet another heinous oversimplification of the complex problems facing education, educators, students, and families today. 

The rest of the story? I'm sure there's even more. I'm tired of hearing half-stories in the sound bytes mainstream America turns to as it's source of facts.