Is This Perverted, Devious or Just Stupid?

A friend passed along this story about a school district in Philadelphia which gave its students laptops (including a webcam) and then used the webcams to spy on the students.  A lawsuit was brought against the school system after a student was “disciplined” for “inappropriate behavior at home.”  Part of me really wants to know what that specific behavior was.  I do feel bad for the kid.  Imagine getting called into the principal’s office and hearing this:

“Sorry, but you’re going to be suspended for looking at inappropriate videos on the school computer at home.  We caught you on the web cam.”

The principal was watching you watch porn!

Who thought this was a good idea?  I guess the more pertinent question on my mind is: what were they trying to find out?  That teenagers look at porn?  That they tend to do inappropriate things?  I could’ve told you that and I didn’t need a webcam in a teenager’s bedroom to find out.  I’m trying to imagine the meeting in which education professionals decided there would be no lawsuit for this behavior.  How is this different from spying????

Sorry, this is kind of a rant instead of a well thought-out blog post.  It’s like the dumb criminal stories or the teachers who sell drugs to students.  Why do people think they can get away with stuff like this?

Distraction?

I’m wondering: are the schools are giving in or getting modern.  The school policy is that students may not have electronic devices in class.  But the hallways are fair game.  This is a change from last year when no electronic devices were allowed at all.  In fact, if I saw a cell phone or iPod in the hall, I could confiscate it.  Now they are allowed to listen to music or text or call people, as long as it’s not during class.  I think that’s a positive.

However, walking through the hallways, I notice many students in class, doing work, and listening to music.  I admit, I allow it if they’re working hard.  They definitely become more quiet and do their work.  It’s as if they go into their own little world.  Is this wrong?  I remember when I was growing up, the joke was that we’d go home and do our homework while watching TV, listening to the radio, talking on the phone and chatting on AIM.  It’s pretty much the same thing now, except they do all of that with their iPhone instead of needing 6 different devices.  Are we training them to be permanently distracted or are we just giving in to teenagers?

Where Is It All Going?

Summer book list:

Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil

Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk

1776 by David McCullough

I’m about halfway done with 1776 – a book I picked up after reading a biography of George Washington.  Pygmy was pretty funny and interesting…until the end.  Usually Chuck Palahniuk books end with a splash, a surprise, a wow.  This one, not so much.

Age of Spiritual Machines.  I admit, I had heard of this book only because of the Our Lady Peace album (Spiritual Machines) which I love so much.  I knew it was based on this book, so I had to buy it when I saw it.  (Just an aside, I have a terrible habit of buying books and having them sit on my book shelf for many months or years before reading it.)  This book blew my mind.  Anybody interested in one man’s predictions on where our world is going should read this book.  Think of it as Terminator, but without the nuclear war.

2029: There is a growing discussion about the legal rights of computers and what constitutes being “human.”  Machines claim to be conscious.  These claims are largely accepted.

By the year 2099: There is a strong trend towards a merger of human thinking with the world of machine intelligence that the human species initially created.  There is no longer any clear distinction between humans and computers.  Most conscious entities do not have a permanent physical presence.  Because most information is published using standard assimilated knowledge protocols, information can be instantly understood.  The goal of education, and of intelligent beings, is discovering new knowledge to learn. [emphasis mine]

That’s some pretty heavy stuff.  Before we get all sci-fi horror movie, let’s consider some current technological trends.

• Computers can interact with our voices, almost well enough not to annoy us.  I know we all hate those customer service menus (I said SPEAK TO A REPRESENTATIVE!) but companies obviously think the computers do the job well enough to handle most calls.  Newer cars have lots of voice command.  Soon we should be interacting with computers all the time.  They now have phones that can instantly translate language.
• Body and brain implants present an interesting combination of human and machine, don’t they?  Right now, electrical implants can help with brains with deteriorating diseases, implants help deaf people hear, and artificial limbs are becoming an awful lot like Luke Skywalker’s new hand.  American’s place a ton of importance on physical enhancements (face-lifts, botox, boob jobs, etc.) how long until somebody wants to pay for a cochlear implant to improve their hearing.  Want contact lenses that give you hi-def vision?
• Right now you can swallow a camera that allows doctors to see into your body.  Scientists are working on tiny robots that not only detect abnormalities, but can fix them.  Two cancer cells?  Destroyed before you knew they existed.

We are continually meshing with machines.  They continually get smaller and smaller, and they are placed everywhere.  Look around you.  How many objects in your room have computer chips.  Right now I count my computer, my iPod, my digital camera, my alarm clock, my TV, my TV remote, my cell phone, my DVD player, my internet router and my exercise heart-rate monitor.  I’m sure I missed some.  My point is that, no very slowly, we are being surrounded by and are becoming dependent on computers.  The book makes a good point.  Ten to fifteen years ago, if all the computers went out, we could still function as a society.  Now?  Geez, look what happened when Twitter went out last week.  Imagine a day without using a computer system.  No internet, no phone, no car, no ATM, no TV, no lights, nothing.  What would you do?  Read?!

So where am I going with this?  I believe that I may be in the last age group of teachers who will be able to teach until retirement.  I believe that 30 years from now computers will take over education.  That isn’t to say that there won’t be humans involved, just that they won’t be teaching like you and I are used to.  Even this summer, had I kept the summer school job, I would have been moderating and assisting more than teaching.  The kids get the text book, the learning module and the problem sets.  I help them out with things they don’t understand and then grade their work.  If automated technology shows to be as effective as regular teachers, look for school systems to push this as much as possible.  Teachers are the most expensive part of education.  Think of all the cool stuff schools could buy with 30 teacher salaries.  In the near future, every desk will be an interactive station (kind of like your touch-screen cell phones, only larger and better).  I think in 20 years, students will be coming to school more for social interaction than learning.

This is my prediction.  Anybody have a prediction of their own?

(Note: all of the current and future technologies I touched on come from either my own reading or from Age of Spiritual Machines.  None of it was made up.)

Homework Grades and Teachers-as-Entertainers

A few things on my mind today after reading the student newspaper:

Our school newspaper is one of the most unprofessional and terrible ones I’ve read.  Every article serves to voice the authors’ opinion, even factual articles, and there are numerous grammatical mistakes in ever edition.  On top of that, the “reporters” make up quotes, attribute them to wrong people or tell you want they want you to say.  And, I save this for last, the teacher is just a horrendous [insert bad word].  If she doesn’t like you, and she doesn’t like me for whatever reason, she will openly talk badly about you to her students.  Now that’s a professional!

Anyway, there was an article about the rules on cell phone use in school.  The student is trying to make the case that cell phone use should be allowed in school (even though the article is about cell phone laws) and here is one pertinent quote (emphasis mine): “While the long, drawn-out days go by, students have to find some source of entertainment to keep them awake in classes.”  They have to find sources of entertainment?  I’m sorry, I didn’t realize my job was to entertain teenagers.  I’m pretty sure I get paid to teach them.  What did all us poor students do prior to 2002?  Sure, we doodled, we daydreamed, we tried to sleep, but mostly we took notes and did the work we were asked to do.  Why?  Because that’s what school is there for.
I completely agree that teachers should find creative and interesting ways to convey their subject to the students.  But sometimes you just have to get through some material.  Or sometimes you have to learn the mirror equation and practice it.  School, like work and life, can’t always been fun.  I’m also of the mind that the reason these kids have such short attention spans is because they’ve been fed snipets of information their whole lives and have never needed to concentrate for more than five minutes at a time.  That needs to change!

Second topic:

There is a new trend in education (I don’t know if it’s in the area or the whole country) that says teachers should not grade anything that isn’t done in the classroom.  No graded homework.  Also, no zeroes if a kid doesn’t hand in an assignment because that doesn’t reflect what he/she knows.  So no effort grades.  What a bunch of crap!  I’m sorry, but there’s really no good way to get a good grade in most classes if you don’t do your homework.  I know some kids pull it off.  But ALL of my kids who get C’s and below skip the homework.  Or they copy the homework from a friend so they get the credit.  I’m happy to give those kids small HW grades, because they invariably BOMB the tests and quizzes.  Now they want to take away those HW grades.  Fine.  So all those C and D students will be F students.  What world do we live in that HW is too much work.  I’ve tried ungraded homework…all of last year in fact.  Maybe 3 students in each class did their homework.  The rest did not.  Then they wonder why they fail tests.  What a disaster.  This is the reason that American students don’t compare to other countries.  We are actively trying to remove their work ethic.

Let’s end on a good note:

I was showing my honors students how to make an image with a curved mirror, in the process creating a reflection of the outside on a piece of paper.  “Mr. _______, tell us again why this class is called ‘physics’ and not ‘magic’?”

Music: “New Slang” by The Shins on Oh, Inverted World

Teacher Twitter

Sitting here with one student.

Wow, that was so exciting.  I hope you all appreciate my short status message.  I mention this after Monday night’s Daily Show segment about Senators and Congressmen using Twitter during Obama’s speech the other night.  Instead of paying attention to the address, they were busy putting up stupid messages on Twitter.

I have to confess that, although I’m not even close to a technophobe, I am very much against having new technology just because it’s new.  Technology for technologies sake….which happens to the be the motto of my school.  It’s new!  Let’s buy it and tell everyone we have it!  And then the teachers don’t use whatever-it-is because it doesn’t have practical use in a classroom.  More on this later.

Ok, not a technophobe.  But I resisted a cell phone in 2001 because, really, who was I calling?  But I embraced flat screen TVs.  And cable internet connections.  But not phones with QWERTY keyboards.  Or cameras really.  I have a digital camera to take pictures.  Myspace?  No.  Facebook?  Yes, but I’m not on it 24-7.  And I don’t update my status ever.  iTouch?  I can’t think of any recent time where I wished I had music and internet access at the same time and didn’t actually have it.

The point being, why do we need to write down little bits of thought for the world to see?  And who subscribes to these things?  I wouldn’t even care to subscribe to my girlfriend’s twitter (if she had one).  But, old people in Congress have decided that the YOUNG PEOPLE LIKE TWITTER so we will use it because it’s cool and then they’ll vote for me because I use Twitter and they use Twitter and we relate so vote for me because we think the same and I represent you and vote for me please don’t forget to vote.

But these Congressmen that don’t pay attention to what they’re supposed to…they have assistants to tell them what it was all about.  They have staff that writes speeches for them and basically does all the dirty work.  My students, on the other hand, do not have these things.  But they are all on their phones all day long.  They pay attention to very little.  It’s amazing, really.  It’s not even an attention span issue.  At any moment, probably half my students are using their cell phones.  It’s not allowed. So I’ll ask the one or two that I catch to put it away.  If I see it again, I take it.  Fair enough, so I have the time to warn a couple kids about using their phones.  Maybe take one.  But if I decided to take up that fight, I’d never get to teaching.  They don’t even care about losing their phones.  Their parents come after school to pick it up and give it right back to them.  No repercussions.  So they don’t pay attention.  And they don’t listen to me.  And they do poorly on quizzes and tests and claim that I “never went over this” (italics indicate whiny voices) even though I gave an example problem RIGHT BEFORE THE STUPID TEST THAT WAS EXACTLY LIKE THAT PROBLEM.  So, yeah, they don’t pay attention.  And they are vindicated because they aren’t the only ones.  Hey, if a Senator doesn’t listen to the President, why should I listen to you?

My other favorite excuse, and this is true, is this: “But I was texting another teacher!” or “But I was texting the assistant principal, he told me to!”  I swear, my only response to this is WTF.  I don’t care.  I don’t care who told you to text them, if it’s in my class it’s not allowed.  But how am I supposed to reinforce this idea if they are texting other teachers or part of the administration???  Too ridiculous.

Lastly, having to do with technology for technologies sake.  Apparently Apple is doing a promotion where certain schools will be picked to receive iTouches for every student.  Our assistant principal thinks this is a great idea.  Why?  Because it’s another piece of electronics that he can tell everybody we have.  What in the world would every student need an iTouch for, besides to have a principal approved reason not to pay attention to the teacher.  But, of course, it’s our fault if the kid fails a test.  Because we’re not doing our job.  Our ever-increasingly impossible job.