Technology is not a magic bullet

I love the story of Barbara Arrowsmith Young. A woman faced with a bevy of Learning Disabilities takes them on and overcomes them through hard work and determination.

That's why I get frustrated whenever I read yet another psycho-educational report from another psychologist who throws technology at a student as if it will make their learning disability go away.

Imagine the 7 year old child who is handed a tablet in class and told to use it. If they were distracted in class already, this is supposed to be less distracting?

I hear time and time again this assumption that kids "just get technology". As if just handing them a device is all we have to do.

Students with learning disabilities will struggle to learn the technology well and may even be more distracted by the tool than mainstream students.

Do I mean to say that there is no place for these tools at all? Certainly not. But we need to be giving more thought to how and why they are deployed and we need to make sure there are the necessary supports in place for students to succeed.

We also need to manage parent expectations. These tools and devices will not make the learning disability go away.

A Culture of Fear

Whenever we have a few minutes to spare in class I like to do word puzzles with my students. Like these ones:

I was saddened today as I watched fear spread across my classroom. Students would not attempt to answer because they were afraid of being wrong. I could feel the change in climate. Only those students who don't have strong social skills would answer as they couldn't sense the change. It reached the point that I had no one willing to guess.

How do you fight against a culture that believes that only right answers matter?

How do we encourage kids to see that being wrong is how we learn?

I'm scared. It's the first day of school.

I wonder if the students know that I am as scared as they are?

I've been teaching for 14 years and yet I still am sick to my stomach about tomorrow.

Will I be able to connect with every student?

Will I understand what they are going through and be able to help them?

When the bullying comes, because it will, will my efforts to help work?

Will all the brilliant and clever lessons I have prepared actually work?

Will I not be boring?

Will I teach what these students need?

The worst part of all, is that I already know the answer to these questions.

It's "no".

Not every day, not every time, and not for every student.

But, through God's grace, sometimes, perhaps even most of the time, I will.

And so tonight I will pray, like I do every night, that tomorrow I will have what I need to be a good teacher and that God will fill in the gaps where I don't.

How I got fired

I've been fired twice in my life. One was more difficult than the other.

I've been working as the technology coordinator at my school for about 8 years now. When I got the position it was a breath of fresh air to my career. I was no longer a square peg being forced into a round hole.

At first my job was far more the role of cheerleader and salesperson. My job was to demonstrate, prove, and convince that technology had a role in education. I wrote proposals, did demos, fought for more budget, helped create curriculum, selected software and more.

As I succeeded at my job of cheerleading I began to spend more and more time maintaining and installing hardware and software. I enjoyed this part of my job too. I enjoyed solving puzzles and getting to that moment when everything worked for a teacher who needed it.

Eventually the cheerleading side of my job almost disappeared as technology became part of the lifeblood of my school. I was still enjoying my job, but difficulties were beginning to arise. I was blessed to have the assistance of a skilled technician throughout all of this time period, but I began to need his assistance more and more. He was only part time and just couldn't give it. I still enjoyed pulling computers apart, finding solutions, installing projectors, and all the other parts of my job. The problem was that the two of us could not keep up with the amount of work that needed to be done.

As the technology coordinator it was and is my duty to look at the overall health of IT in my school. I could see the difficulties we were having and it was my responsibility to look for the source. After lots of research, thinking, and experimenting I came to a difficult realization.

The problem was me.

I am a professional and skilled classroom teacher, but I am an amateur technician. Despite how much I enjoyed fixing computers, I wasn't that experienced at it. Something that would take a highly trained technician an hour to fix would take me 3 times as long. I didn't know enough about the many many options out there to find the most cost effective and efficient maintenance solutions. Nor did I have the time or inclination to learn. I am passionate about education, not technology.

I had to make one of the more difficult decisions of my career.

I fired myself.

So let me ask this question of you. Is there something you need to fire yourself from?

Paint and Grace

As I stood in that room that I had worked so hard to finish painting, I surveyed the walls.

In my mind I cataloged the many mistakes I had made. I could see every mistake, every slip. I could remember every spot I messed up. I knew that my work was far from perfect.

Then my wife walked in.

“It's beautiful!” she said.

That's grace.

Despite our brokenness, our mistakes and struggles God loves us anyway.

Our best efforts, our greatest triumphs, our most amazing feats will never be perfect.

But God loves us anyway.

I want my students to see that.

Paint and Sin

I stood in our bedroom surverying the beautiful walls in which I had strived for excellence.

This room was my act of worship to glorify my God.

But it was not truly perfect.

I could take you on a tour of the room and show you where my brush slipped and hit the ceiling. I tried to wipe it up, but I can still find it. I can show you the spot where I could have taken more time with drywall compound and sander to make it smoother. Or the spot where paint dripped from my brush and I didn't notice. or...or....or

I could blame it on the fact that I've never been trained. I don't have much practice, or skill. I could blame it on the contractor who was sloppy with the drywall. I could point out how I was running out of time and had to rush. I could make excuses.

It doesn't matter. Despite my best efforts it isn't perfect.

Even if I took more time, got more experience, got more training, found another contractor to redo the drywall, took the razorblade to the floor to remove the remnants of paint from the last painter, it would never be perfect.

Somewhere the brush would slip and it wouldn't be perfect.

It is the same for us, in all things.

I wish my students to learn the same thing.

Paint and Worship

There's a word use that I hear in Christian circles a lot these days that bothers me.

“The worship was really good in church today.”

“Did you hear the worship on Sunday?”

In each of these cases they are talking about singing.

Worship is far more than singing.

As I spent my four days slowly and carefully attempting to achieve excellence in my painting in our bedroom a few weeks ago I worshiped.

Each paint stroke was an act of worship. I strove for excellence in that room for the glory of God. I spent hours honouring God through my work. That was my worship.

This is the third reason I believe in excellence, even excellence in corners that no one else can see. Every moment of our day is, or should be, an act of worship. Those acts of worship should be the very best that I can do for God.

I want my students to understand that everything we do, great and small, seen or unseen, should be this kind of worship.

Just singing on Sunday isn't good enough.

Paint and Excellence

Steve Jobs got a lot of things right.

Now, I'm not a fan of his management style but I do quite like his insistence that even the inside or backside of his products be beautiful, even if the only person who might see it was the repairman.

This is why I was being driven crazy while I was painting our bedroom this summer.

You see, whoever painted the room before me was sloppy and messy. It looked like they didn't even try to protect the floor as there were paint splatters all over the room.

Then there's the person who did the drywall which is uneven and not sanded well at all.

And that's just in the room itself!

Now we come to the closet. Crooked walls, brush strokes on the floor and ceiling. Clearly both the person who built the room and the person who painted it were not striving for excellence.

I did.

There I was on the floor of the closet painting as carefully as I could.

Someone might say, "But who's ever going to see that back corner that's going to be hidden by boxes and clothes?"

To that question I have three responses:

1. I saw it. 
2. I have to live in that room every day knowing the work I put into it. Even if it wasn't my room and just a job I did, I would have to walk around knowing whether I did my best or not.
3. And one more reason I'll get to a little later.

An Inch Deep and a Mile Wide

For the first ten years in my math class 30% of my students would fail my algebra unit test. Every year.

And what did I do after?

I taught the next unit. Where algebra was necessary. Which meant that the same students would fail that unit too.

I didn't know what else to do.

I would race through the year trying to "cover" the curriculum. I wasn't so much teaching as throwing things at students and hoping stuff would stick. If students were ready it would work. If they weren't they were out of luck.

Fortunately, the school I work at has been challenging us to think differently.

A few years ago I started experimenting with the "Flipped Classroom" format. I've blogged about this here and here.

So now I spend my days teaching like this:

We get a lot less "work" done. In fact, many of my students walk out of my classroom having only "covered" half of the official math curriculum. Which does lead to some potential problems and questions.

• What if the next year's teacher doesn't follow the same philosophy?
• What happens when the student leaves our school and goes to another school?
• Some of these students need more than a year to actually learn all the material, how do we make that happen given that no one fails?

Despite all these questions and challenges, for which I do not have answers, I will not switch back.

You see, no one has failed my algebra unit test for the past three years. 

What kind of teacher do you want to be?

There are two teachers that I look back on in high school as an example of the kind of teacher I want to be.

First, Mr. Afari.

Mr. Afari came from Nigeria to teach us Calculus.

I always got A's in math class without even trying. Oh, I often made little mistakes here and there, but the teachers would only take off a single point and re-work the rest of the problem to see if I got the idea right. I always got the idea, so I could easily get an almost perfect score without any effort.

That's not how Mr. Afari marked. One single mistake meant a zero. The answer was wrong. Therefore you got no points. At midterm I had a D!

Second, Ms. Iwonttellyouhername.

She taught exactly what was in the textbook word for word. The only thing I remember about her teaching is that if I sat down the night before the test and read the chapter I would get perfect. There are other things about her class I remember, but I'm too embarrassed to tell you them here. I got an A.

What were the results of these two teachers? I stopped going to Ms. Whatshername's class. I just showed up for the tests and still got an A. In Mr. Afari's class? I earned a B-. You see, after that midterm I never made another mistake. Not one. I checked everything twice, or three times. That was the only way I could earn a B-. I had to get perfect scores to average out all the terrible ones from the first half of the term.

If I have to choose what kind of teacher I will be I choose Mr. Afari.

And Mr. Afari, wherever you are, thank you. I still check everything two or three times.