Who Are We Kidding?

Golden Gate Bridge

I’m both a poet and a teacher and if there’s anything both of those parts of my character has a hard time with, it’s avoiding the truth. 

Many educational leaders are avoiding the truth that there’s a generation of kids out there whose lives are finely meshed with digital technologies. I know when people are overwhelmed or just plain unsure of how to respond to something new, they go into denial.   I suppose it’s a coping mechanism, but at some point they have to face things and adapt. 

Back in the 80′s, I remember being staggered by the idea that people watched 50 hours of tv a week. Now we’re looking at a generation of kids who not only watch conventional tv and go to the movies, but also spend 40 to 50 or more hours a week on computers – in social networking sites, on ipods, on cell phones, etc.  In the midst of all this, there are too many of us trying to shut out that reality, rather than immersing ourselves in it. 

I was on the committee that drafted our school rules, including those on the use of “personal communications devices” and I think we knew we couldn’t really make them keep these in their lockers,  but I guess the timing wasn’t right to admit it, at least not publicly.  There are lots of reasons educational leaders tread so cautiously, but it’s time to face the truth. 

When you spend the better part of your day in a building with about 900 teenagers, you need to expend a lot of energy to deny what’s happening.  Almost all have computers at home, cell phones or iPhones, and iPods or MP3 players.  For a huge chunk of their day they’re wired, the lines threaded under their shirts and sweaters or their talking openly into a device as they stare through a wall, the floor, or me.  When we remind them we shouldn’t be seeing that in the school, they invariably say they are speaking to their mothers or sick grandmothers.  (And for the most part, I think their mothers and grandmothers would tell you they need their phones with them at all times and should be allowed to use them in the halls or library.)  You’ll also find them making their way around the many blocked sites on the school network. The more obedient ones may just roll their eyes as they say, “They’re so ridiculous.  I need youtube for my class presentation! What are they so afraid of?” 

What are we afraid of?  They won’t listen to us.  They’ll use youtube to view seedy or dodgy things.  They’ll tie up the school’s bandwidth by watching music videos. They’ll pick up their phones in the middle of class to conduct a drug deal or to find out what time their fathers are picking them up. Bottom line – they’ll do things, some bad, some really bad,  some just at the wrong time. 

Now it seems to me over the past hundred years or so, we’ve come to trust young people with directing their own feet and hands and voices.  We know there are a lot of nasty things  high school students can and sometimes do do with their words and actions.  We’ve spent a lot of time teaching and modeling what’s appropriate, ethical, moral, socially acceptable.   Would we think of preventing students from using their voices or hands completely because we are afraid they’ll misuse them?  Let me take this to a ridiculous extreme to make my point.  Imagine a place where students arrive at the door only to be chained at the ankles, bound at the wrists behind their backs, and  secured with duct tape across their mouths.  We wouldn’t be sending many of them to the office – at least not for telling us where to go, or for taking a 40 minute washroom break, and coming back trailing the scent of cigarette smoke.  But it seems to me, they’d still find a way to keep the vice-principal busy.  They’d learn to disrupt our great lessons by groaning their dissatisfaction, unnerving us by rattling their chains, and frightening us by wriggling their hands free now and then.  We can try to ban and bar 21 century technologies but we can’t stop their groaning, rattling, and wriggling at us. 

I know we’re in the midst of a huge societal shift in communication and learning and that’s both exciting and scary.  But it seems  that we educational leaders need to make 21st century technologies our own, harness them, determine how they can make teaching and learning more dynamic, more meaningful.  Our kids are growing up in the 21st century and need to learn 21 century skills.  We need to help them, as we do with everything else.  

Can we abandon our foolish denial and recognize that our students need help as they make sense of their wired world?  I hope so. It’s a challenge to find the time, but I hope we’ll take time to become a part of that world and put our energy into figuring out how to blend all these new communication technologies with all those other good things we’ve been doing in school for a long time.  All this so that we might help them learn to become decent digital citizens, learn what they need to know,  navigate their way through this huge onslaught of information, that is,  use 21st century technologies effectively at the right time for the right reasons.

Advertisement