Friend or Frustration?

A friend, Sarah, sent me a New York Times article entitled New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology about how a greater and greater number of teachers (mostly high school and college) are seeing phones, computers and other technology as distractions without educational component. Of course, I can see their point. If I am sitting in a meeting with a computer, I am more likely to become distracted than if I did not have one. It's a draw, a lure away from the events transpiring in front of me.

The only time that does not apply is when the discussion or lesson is so very thrilling that I simply must watch and listen. So, as a teacher, does that mean that every one of my lessons has to be so very thrilling that a student cannot not listen? Must I, as Neil Postman puts it, amuse them to death?--my death, that is, since I would kill myself just trying to make every single lesson amazingly entertaining. And isn't that doing our children a disservice, because when, in the real work world, are they going to be entertained in meetings? It's the most I can do not to walk out when my time is being wasted.

Effectiveness of Technology in Education

Great article from T.H.E. Journal about The Effectiveness of Technology in Education. Basically, she says it's an irrelevent question. Check it out:
http://www.thejournal.com/articles/21544_5

Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink

For my "Fiction and Film of the 1980s" graduate class at Loyola, I am reading a book called Amusing Oursevles to Death by Neil Postman. It's from the 80s (duh), and mostly focused on how the shift from a literary culture to a visual (tv) culture has degraded our public conversation. He speaks about how the information glut has decreased our "information-action ratio".

Here's how it works: the more information we have about the world that is irrelevant to our lives, the less action we can take in response to it. For instance, we learn that there are Buddhist monks protesting in Burma. What can we, here in America, as regular folks, really DO about that situation? Our options are limited. Back in the day, when all news was relevant to our geographic locale (like with regional newspapers) we felt less impotent, felt a sense of more control over our lives. Postman's theory states that we are left asking ourselves: "What I am I to do with all of this irrelevant, decontextualized information?" Make it into a diversion, an amusement, like crossword puzzles, Trivial Pursuit, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? This creates a pseudo-context, a "last refuge of a culture overwhelmed by irrelevance, incoherence and impotence." (p. 76)

So what's the answer? I dunno. I'm only half way through the book. I can hazard a guess. Follow folk-singer John Prine's advice in his song "Spanish Pipedream": "Blow up your T.V., throw away your paper, move to the country and build you a home, plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches, and you'll find Jesus on your own." The more I learn about my job, the more I realize I'm teaching children how to wield a sword. It's still a weapon made for a war they will inevitably face; my only recourse is to teach them how to use it with honor.

Image credit: www.methuen.co.uk