I depend on technology just as much as anybody. My life would be much less colorful without YouTube or Spotify. It’s hard to remember the times before all of it: before, smartphones, tablets in the classroom, streaming, GPS, etcetera..etcetera.. I used to get a thrill out of studying maps! Even though I still kind of do, I mostly depend on GPS now everywhere I drive or even traverse, like everyone else.

As you can expect, I have seen (as all of us have) massive changes in the culture and in the classroom due to The Advent. I’ll just call the introduction of smartphones and the internet as The Advent henceforth, if you don’t mind. At first, it was a thrill to have a class set of computer tablets for the students to take their state tests on. Saves paper, provides immediate feedback, engages students for a while…all of this. Then, problems crept in, like students exploring other avenues during class just clicks away and easy to conceal , like games or googling or plagiarizing or maybe worse. At my high school in 2003-5, the policy was for teachers to “collect any phones being used in the class and bring them down to the office. Only parents can pick them up after school.” In addition, all kinds of disciplinary measures had to be added. You can imagine it became a losing battle, and it still is. In fact, once again here were the teachers becoming the villains trying to separate students from their beloved apparatus, even for an hour…torture!

Two stories surface in the windmills of my mind featuring The Advent and the trials of tech in the classroom:

Story One: In 2015 or 16, my English Department was required to stop issuing books and to use texts only in an online form. For me, this was a terrible thing. I had devoted much time to teaching students to annotate and to otherwise engage with actual pages in books. But okay, I supposed I must comply. Yet, in a subversive move, I took a class set of my literature books and stored (translate: hid) them in a cabinet, for secret use sometimes. When I did take out those textbooks, most of the students were pleased to not having to look at the small screen, at least for a while. Also enjoyable were the beautiful photos and artwork feature alongside of the stories, poems, plays, and articles in the book. Students tended to ask why couldn’t we just use these instead.

When my principal found out about this transgression, she flipped her lid. Now, she and I had previously been quite friendly. At that time I was also the Building Steward for the Teachers Union, and we had developed a solid and respectful working relationship. I would have never expected the battle that ensued. She sent the custodians to confiscate every last textbook they could find in my classroom and lock them up in some dusty, unused, mysterious storage closet within the bowels of the school. Fast forward several months, I had contacted the local newspaper, an expose was written about the debacle, and I eventually got those books back. However, none of the other English teachers got theirs back. So they had to suffer, (they hated not using books as well- it seemed. Hmmm…we all felt that not having books in an English class was counterintuitive ). But me–I had the ” privilege” of using a literature textbook for another couple of years. They began to shrivel and turn yellow from excessive use- I only had about 30 for all the students to use each period and none to take home.

Story Two: After I retired from teaching full time in public school, I got a job at a charter school. It was a strange experience, and once again I had a troubling situation. Here was another principal with micromanaging tendencies! In this school, I also did not have any textbooks, but I did have many school-funded education apps and programs to use in order to train students to take their State Tests. I did as I was told, once in a while trying to incorporate some traditional pen-and-paper methods I had always used, like my reading logs. (The Reading Log assignment/activity, one of my favorites, is at my store on Teachers Pay Teachers…)

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/store/literary-ladder-lessons

However, one fine day at my charter school, a student noticed that I wrote many things in cursive, and she asked how I learned to do that. I took the “teaching moment” to show all of my students how to write in cursive as an actual lesson. Can I tell you? They were fascinated. Soon, some students asked if they could have regular lessons in cursive, and I complied. Even a couple students I didn’t know came by to ask if they could come in to my cursive lessons. Twice a week for about half an hour, we learned aspects of cursive: the shape of the letters, how to connect them, making the size of the letters consistent, forming words, writing whole sentences. Students were pleased to do this, and I received compliments from a few of the parents who remembered their own lessons in cursive (especially from the island nations like Jamaica).

When my principal discovered I was doing this, she forbade me from continuing, stating: “This has nothing to do with the curriculum.”

Writing in cursive gave students a feeling of connection with the history of language. We discussed how some people used beautiful calligraphy, how Asian characters were written with paintbrushes and considered art, and also, how handwriting allowed them to express themselves in a more personal and permanent way.

Few students can actually write anything by hand anymore, much less even sign their own name. I’m not sure if this is the vision of the future we all hoped for our kids. With AI, not only do we not have to handwrite, but we don’t have to think– not really. Ah….the luxuries of modern life. We are the robots.

Here is a link to the article in the Miami Herald about the confiscation of my textbooks:

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article219197755.html

Here is another article about Tech in Education:

https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2023/04/technology-might-be-making-education-worse