January 20, 2006
Smoke at the tips of my wings
By Herm Card
Editor's note: This column chronicles Herm Card's musings in 2005-06, his last year of teaching before retirement. Future installments will be posted here at www.nysut.org/herm.
Add your comments and observations through e-mail to: retiring@nysutmail.org.
On Dec. 20, I submitted the following letter to my superintendent of schools:
“I am submitting this letter as notice of my intent to retire from my teaching position at Driver Middle School, effective July 1, 2006, my first opportunity to retire in accordance with the district’s retirement incentive plan.”
The letter was a little over three times as long as Richard Nixon’s resignation. I don’t necessarily think of my retirement as three times as important as his, but I have been a teacher much longer than he was president.
I handed it to his secretary, along with a smile and the somewhat less than original words, “I quit.”
She replied, with what seemed to be a sigh, “We had hoped you might change your mind.”
I tried to imagine the collective “we” that might feel that way, and was genuinely stuck for a clever reply. I gulped a bit, backed out of the office, and found myself only able to come up with the word “yikes” as I realized that I had just taken the first official step toward retirement.
I returned to school on Tuesday, Jan. 3, the day the school board was to consider my letter. There was, of course, no actual considering to be done. It is a formality.
However, I allowed myself to picture something of a debate, a board member suggesting that maybe they could talk me out of it, perhaps by offering some incentives — a multi-year, no-cut contract, a substantial increase in pay and benefits and perhaps clauses offering bonuses for making the all-star team or … oops. I seem to have drifted into an alternate reality.
In fact, on Wednesday there was a letter in my mailbox notifying me that, “with regret” they had accepted my letter of retirement. Again, all I could come up with was “yikes.”
As of July 1 I will be unemployed for the first time in 30-some years. I had made a BIG change.
“It ain’t like the old days,” many thousands of people have said for many thousands of reasons. By itself, that is a neutral statement, and undeniably true, but it’s usually said in such a way as to bemoan the passing of the “good old days.” The old days always seem to be better than the present.
I’ve mentioned that the simplicity of the “old days” was certainly attractive. But education is not simple, and becoming less so.
The bulk of my developing career fits in the era between the Dylan titles, “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (1962), and “Things Have Changed” (1999). From my sophomore year in high school through my 25th year as a teacher, change was enormous.
Societal issues, technology, demographics, economics, values, taste, clothing styles, music — all changed.
Teaching has changed. Education philosophy has changed. Attitudes toward education, toward teaching, toward teachers have all changed. The entire concept of knowledge transmission has changed.
Computers have become the dog-that-eats-the-homework of the new millennium, as shown by these examples:
• “My printer won’t work.”
• “My computer is broken.”
• “My disk is corrupted.”
• “We’re out of paper.”
• “My dad had to use the computer for work.”
• “My dog ate my flash drive.”
Time capsule
I never envisioned myself in this business long enough to look back 25 years, but recently I was putting together a workshop for a conference and dug into my files, circa 1980, for some materials.
I found lessons copied using Ditto masters. For those of you under 40, these were the treated papers that were rolled on a Ditto machine drum, interacting with copier fluid, and producing copies of quality far inferior to today’s high tech ones. When my school replaced the hand-cranked version with an electric one, we thought we were on the cutting edge. I had actually worked in a Ditto, Inc., warehouse as a “perk” for being a college baseball player, so I felt a connection to the technology.
I also discovered a box containing film strips and audio cassettes which would work in a Dukane projector, a clever piece of technology that would synchronize those separate audio and video components, assuming the operator followed the audio cues accurately.
I gave an impromptu lecture on this subject to some younger teachers who were nearby, sort of an extemporaneous, “Hyde Park Corner” soapbox speech that was not understood by any of them. They could not begin to relate to the technology, although some were sure their parents might remember such things from when they had been in school.
(It also occurred to me that the term “younger teachers” applies to nearly all of the teachers I work with.)
Technology has always appealed to the “gadget” gene passed from my grandfather to my father to me, so the technology boom of the last generation has been an exciting time for me. Those of us who remember data cassettes were impressed by the advent of 5-inch disk, wowed by the 3.5-inch disk, blown away by flash drives, DVDs and 250GB portable hard drives. I am able to store everything on a piece of machinery rather than in overflowing file cabinets, shelves and cubby holes that were repositories for my classroom materials in years past.
I used to type — actually type — student worksheets on a typewriter, rolling those Ditto masters carefully, praying that I would not make a mistake that would force me to scratch it off with a razor blade, or eradicate it with foul-smelling remover fluid, hoping all the while that I wouldn’t misalign the paper and ruin the whole thing.
I began typing this article on a Dell AximX5. It is called variously, a pocket PC, a PDA, a handheld computer. It is slightly larger than a deck of cards. Attaching it to a keyboard that folds to about the same size creates a mini laptop computer. I can use this device to surf the Web, check and send email and, most important, to use as a word processor.
I am listening to music on an MP3 player. Next to me is my cell phone, and in case I need it, a digital recorder that I can link to my computer in case need to dictate ideas. I have a digital handheld scanner in case I need to copy something from a book. I can check e-mail and use the Internet by connecting my cell phone to my laptop computer. I have no reason to move, other than to get myself another cup of coffee.
In the mid-1980s I became aware of the Internet. At its inception, it was a university and military funded source of shared information, a resource for scholars and the intellectually curious — no pictures, no music, no eBay. I saw great potential as a source of information that I could apply to teaching, an “immediate” tool for researc, though, at that time, it was somewhat unwieldy since schools did not easily have access to the Internet, nor did we have a great deal of technology to connect to it if such access existed.
In the mid-90s, along came Mosaic, the predecessor of Netscape, and with it, the World Wide Web. Away I went, along with the rest of the world, on an insane technological journey with seemingly unlimited promise for education. The system of education has been forever changed.
Students can log onto sites that question, instruct, test, and grade their work. The only necessity for teacher involvement is to point out Web sites, instruct on navigation, and perhaps monitor to ensure that students are not surfing into forbidden territory.
In “The Fun They Had,” a 1953 short story by Isaac Asimov, education by computer is the theme. Children, in 2157, find a printed book, and wonder what it is. Their speculation about what education in the 1950s might have been like is an ironic reflection of where we may be headed. In about three pages of text, Asimov predicts and defines the potential for education of the very near future.
As a result of this new pace, even the “simple” act of thinking becomes an operation that seems to require an inordinate amount of preparation. When a question is posed, the thought process should kick in. Increasingly, this is not the case. If it did, as it should, I would not have the sign posted in my classroom that says “We have not had a thinking-related injury in 31 years.” Unfortunately, this subtle irony is often lost on my students who want to know what the last injury actually was.
Technology has become a driving force in the pace of education. The use of technology requires preparation. “Booting up” becomes a part of every activity. We must usually change location to utilize the technology, since it doesn't come to where we are.
omputers tend to be in labs that must be reserved far in advance. The need to block out time requires a sense of planning that tends to inhibit response to “teachable moments.” Students become used to a lag time between the assignment of a task and the ability to accomplish it. “We are going to the computer lab on Tuesday so that we can ...” What do we do in the meantime?
I recently acquired a sample curriculum set from a major book publisher that includes lesson plans in books, on CD and on the Internet, test preparation CDs, assessment CDs, homework CDs, Literature and writing CDs, over 250 transparencies, PowerPoint presentations and even ESL versions of the same in French and Spanish.
There are entire Web sites devoted to standards and teaching to accomplish success on the state assessment tests for those standards. There is, for example, a site developed by universities in New York state that could take a fourth-grader from start to finish through a school year, with little, if any, need for a teacher to be overly involved. Simply clicking on the hotlinks that list the state’s learning standards sends one to an assortment of lesson plans addressing that particular standard.
I recently attended a technology in education conference. I presented a “low-tech” workshop on writing. While I was wandering around, gawking at displays, I watched a man write on what appeared to be an ordinary whiteboard. Since I was at a computer conference, I inferred there was more to it. How true.
The board was, essentially, a huge screen and optical mouse pad in one, the pen an optical stylus. He wrote, he highlighted, he poked. On the board appeared dates, photographs, biographies, definitions and histories. An entire unit on the Civil war began to unfold, with voice-overs and PowerPoint and every other bit of techno-gadgetry one could imagine.
It was mesmerizing. I was at once excited and frightened, pulled toward the sun that was this cyber adventure, sensing the heat and noticing wisps of smoke at the tips of my wings. Politely, yet in a rather cowardly way, I thanked him and his team for their time and wandered away, shakily I sensed, in search of a pen and paper to write about the experience.
At another booth, a salesman, in his best carnival-barker patter, invited me to have a look at his wares.
“What do you teach?”
“Eighth grade English.”
“Well, you're in luck, because I've got the answers to all your problems right here in these programs.”
“You mean you have software that will make data and technology-obsessed government and department of education officials wake up to the reality of education?”
“No.(Wary chuckle) I've got the tools you need to have a successful writing program. This will check spelling, grammar, and usage. It will correct errors in punctuation, syntax, construction, clichés, jargon, and any other errors that might involve inappropriate levels of vocabulary — you know, audience awareness and things like that.”
“How does it know?”
“Well, ‘it’ doesn't really know — it just does it. That's how it’s programmed. We have former English teachers on staff who do all the thinking for the programmers.”
“Former English teachers — not current ones?”
“Well, I really don't know — same language though, right?”
“That depends on how former they are.” I was grinning. He was not.
“Seriously,” he said, “this is just what you need to get your program on track.”
“What makes you think it's not?” I asked and wandered away.
Herm Card, a member of the Marcellus Faculty Association, teaches English at Chester S. Driver Middle School in Marcellus.
Herm Card