Scott Adams, the author and creator of the comic strip Dilbert, last year argued in an essay that smart phones represent a kind of “exobrain” that augments our regular brain, giving us the ability to store and retrieve mountains of information… and to perform tasks – like navigating unfamiliar terrain – which extend our mental capacities.

Does this mean our “endobrain” becomes less developed as a result of having an exobrain? Or does it get to actually focus on deeper, more significant (at least to the brain’s owner) things?

Is technology like an office secretary which allows the CEO to focus on (ostensibly) higher level tasks while someone else handles the more menial, more “grunt work-like” like chores of of day-to-day living?

I think about a story I once heard about Einstein. He bought something like 10 gray suits with matching shirts and ties. The reason? He didn’t want to waste precious mental energy on deciding what to wear every day. He made one good decision and replicated it so that, I imagine, he could ponder the nature of the universe… as opposed to ponder what the heck color socks would match his green tie.

Of course, I used to remember all sorts of phone numbers. No longer. Why? Because they are stored in my phone. Am I less intelligent as a result – or have my neurons been liberated to crack the riddle of the Teen Sphinx? (What does not walk on three legs at night yet think it knows the answer to every riddle it’s posed – and if it does not know the answer it deems the knowledge probably not worth knowing? Or something like that.)

Is there merit to this exobrain argument? Why should kids remember who the major players were in the War of 1812 when the info is readily available to them via google? It’s the lessons to be learned about war, leadership, governance and so on that make knowing the players in that war pertinent – and when schools only test rote memorization about such subject matters, we show our folly. (Not that I really want to devolve into bashing bubble tests right now – but sometimes, I just can’t help it. So often they merely assess such surface level knowledge that if a kid had a smartphone, there’d be nothing to these tests at all – and in an age where more and more and more of us have smart phones, what is the real value of this sort of assessment?)

And for those who posit the argument, “Well, what if the “cloud of computing goes down, where will we be then?” I wonder if they are prepared to cook by open fire and live off of salted meats should the power grids go down in all our cities. Are they ready to live without electricity? This tech is here and, like electricity, we are already dependent on it.

Is there merit in this exobrain theory?

Yesterday I blogged about allowing my students to fiddle around with my new iPad. One additional insight I had as I watched them play around with the remarkable device was that, like it or not, seeing the ease with which all of them were able to navigate a tablet computer cemented for me the idea that giving our students tablets trumps outfitting them with printed books for many, many, many reasons.

In fact, to cite the reasons why it makes sense to convert to digital texts in the world of academics strikes me as an argument not even worth making. Remaining anchored to paper, however, is an argument I’d like to hear.

Because I am not sure how, on balance, the comparison is even close.

If money wasn’t the option – or rather, if you looked at the degree of actual savings we’d be able to incur should we measure everything based on a cycle of ten years ROI (return on investment) versus solely the first year’s expenditure of making the initial technological purchase – a tablet that has access to the web which is pre-loaded with class curriculums and software for productivity (i.e. MS Office or another version thereof) seems to be able to dominate the way we currently do things much like the way a high-end laptop computer dominates having twenty filing cabinets full of paper divided by tabs as a system for keeping track of all my work.

From speed to sharing, depth to complexity, multiple perspectives to the latest current thought on a subject matter, what can be done is beyond remarkable with tablets in a student’s hands… and what we can’t do, and what we are not doing, and how we are almost being short-sighted like Wall Street by focusing only on the next quarter instead of our long term growth (can you say year-to-year bubble tests?), well… I may be late to the party/bandwagon but I just got my iPad last Friday so cut me some slack.

The device has let me see the light. Theoretically, I had heard the arguments. But seeing my iPad in the hands of my students really re-shaped my thinking.

And no, printed books are not dead. That’s not what I am saying. What I am saying is that we can do school better. (i.e. I am talking about replacing the notebooks, the physical books, the memos, the physical tests, and so on.) We have the tools to do it better.

And we have them now.

But are we willing to pay for it? Impossible, right?

I say we cancel all the bubble tests for the next 3 – 5 years and use all that money to make all our schools one-to-one laptops/tablets.

I am absolutely convinced public education in the United States of America would be immensely better served by this idea. And if we can’t convert all of them, let’s start with 50%.

Or 25%?

At some point, we are going to begin. After all, the only way to eat an elephant is to start with a first bite.

One day we will have made the leap. And we’ll be better institutions because of it. Let’s start now by using the money we are virtually peeing away with tests everyone agrees are inferior measurements of students aptitude and instead, go right for the goal of actually improving student achievement by providing them with cutting edge tools for the classroom.

After all that’s the “alleged” purpose of the tests anyway: to help us better educate our kids, right?

Better tools do that better than weak tests.

And the sound the rest of the world would hear would be that of America’s students roaring with excitement about the possibilities of what can happen inside a school house.

Our country must make the leap!

In the second part of this series, I am going to chat about Why the “best” teachers are needed to teach our “best” students.

NOTE: This was a questions raised in Part I: which students deserve our school’s best teachers?
(Coming soon, an argument for Part III: Why the “best” teachers are needed to be teaching the “middle level” students and an argument for Part IV: Why the “best” teachers are needed to be teaching the “challenged” students as well as Part V: A review of the discussion and a exploration of what I think I’d be forced to do if I were a principal trying to figure out which teachers to assigned to which classes.)

Why the “best” teachers need to teach the “best” students.

If you think about it, why should the kids who demonstrate the highest commitment to school and most value their own studies and education not be provided/rewarded with a school’s best teachers? Haven’t they earned it?

After all, which teachers are”best” equipped to challenge these most advanced, most ready, most eager to learn young minds? And which teachers are best prepared to get them ready for the demands of education at the next level of their lives?

Which teachers do we want preparing our next generation of leaders because, truthfully, the top kids in our classrooms today show the highest likelihood of being the “top” leaders/discoverers/innovators in industry, science, medicine, politics, law and so on tomorrow?

It may sound like a silly cliche, but these “best” kids (and I use best in an academic sense, not a sense-of-worth-as-a-human-being sense) represent America’s best chance for tomorrow — and don’t they deserve the best of what we’ve got to offer them right now in terms of our nation’s best educator’s being made available to them today? On these children we are all, in a way, pinning our hopes.

Serving the needs of the top students with our best resources reminds me in a way of the 80/20 rule. Essentially, the 80/20 rule postulates that “20 percent of something is most always responsible for 80 percent of the results.”

I know around my school, the top 20% of our students absolutely carry our test scores. Take them out of the equation and we are looking the state taking us over as an entirely failing institution. We’d be toast! (And what school wouldn’t be?)

The top 20% of our students are also the ones most likely to attend a 4 year college and considering that we have over a 45% dropout rate (from freshman to senior in terms of non-matriculation), these students can also make a heckuva claim that they are the ones most in need of rigorous college prep at the pre-collegiate level.

And who better to prepare a kid to face the SAT’s and the AP exams than our school’s “best” teachers? I mean those tests are tough and a great educator can certainly make a great impact on student performance. (Not that tests like these are the end-all, be-all — and if you are familiar with my disposition, you probably know my feelings of BLARFF about bubble tests but still, low SAT’s = virtual exclusion from top-flight universities so let’s not be Pollyannish about the significance of honors and AP classes.)

In yesterday’s post, I divided school educators into 3 categories:

• Best teachers
• Average teachers.
• L’s (the L can stand for “Low” or “Lemons” – fill in your own mental blank).

If we put the L teachers at the front of the room of the AP classes, are we giving our top kids the best chance we can for them to be competitive in a hyper-competitive “get accepted to a university” culture?

If we put the “average” teachers in the front of the room of these classes, are we really cultivating the best and brightest minds in our schools in the most advantageous way we can? I mean how often do “average” teachers create outstanding results?

A school’s “best” students are the ones most likely to do all of their homework, dive most deeply into extra-curricular activities, show an overt thirst for academic challenges and demonstrate a willingness to go over and beyond the “normal course of student duties.”

And you’re going to tell me that kids like this aren’t most deserving of being placed with a school’s best teachers?

Plus, if you are a parent of an “honor” student and you find out that the “best” teachers on campus are not being made available to the “best” students because the school has a philosophy that dictates that the “best” teachers are going to be put with the “lowest” performing kids, aren’t you going to say, “Well, that’s great for them… but then I am going to send my kid to a different school, one where they get the “best” that can be offered to them… because, darn it, my kid has proven they deserve it — and they need it in order to excel later in life.”

The argument states that our best deserve our best. And if you are a school principal don’t you most probably agree? Paying short shrift to our “best” students by not providing them with the “best” teachers, well… how is this “best” for the whole school? What, are you going to put a first year novice teacher with the school’s top students when you have an opportunity to place a veteran with a strong track record in that very same class? Are you going to put a “tenured, worksheet-based, newspaper reading, leaves the moment the bell rings every day” teacher with the top students when you can put in “a hungry, lives for this job type of educator” who constantly seeks to advances their own professional capacities and takes leaderships roles in a variety of capacities of their own volition?

Dangerous as this is to say, there is a very solid argument to be made for why our best deserve our best if you are an administrator that is forced to choose.

And they are all being forced to choose.

(NOTE: Before you blast away at me, please remember that I am going to post in the next few days an argument as to why the “best” teachers are needed to be teaching the “middle level” students and an argument for Why the “best” teachers are needed to be teaching the “challenged” students. This is just Part I of a series — but all thoughts, comments, personal attacks on my intellectual inferiority and moral repugnance are welcome.)