The “No Cell Phone” policy which so many schools still have in place just doesn’t make sense to me. Why? Because the phone of today is, well… no longer a phone.

Yes, phones are phones. But they are also…

• planners so kids can keep track of all their assignments.
• research tools to quickly find facts, reference info, and the such.
• blah, blah, blah. (Really, if I kept listing and listing all the possibilities of today’s phones, I’d never be able to stop typing right now and get to my bigger idea.)

The point is, the phone of today has evolved into a pocket computer of immense dimensions. In fact, it often operates as the central operational tool for many, many people’s lives. Especially the people who make the “No Cell Phone” policies for our school districts. (Can you even imagine the district personnel without their Blackberries? What would the Asst. Supt do without their iPhone? My goodness, how would so much of the dysfunction continue to amble along if not for these devices? Alas, I stray.)

Virtually 90% of the white collar workers I know who earn six-figure salaries are absolutely dependent on their cell phones. Phones have literally evolved into an indispensable business tool and yet, in all this college readiness talk we hear all the time, we seem to have this wall of hypocrisy separating our stated aims from our actual implemented policies. To be “college ready” means to be able to function in a wired world with proficiency and aptitude. (I am not sure when it happened entirely, I am not sure if they sent out a memo but in this day and age, the two ideas are almost inextricably wed.)

College applications are online, college schedules are online, college financial aid info, professor office hours, and on and on… what isn’t online in today’s college world? The move towards entirely paperless is afoot! Not sure if it will ever reach 100% saturation but it is semi-fascinating to witness the laptop give way to the smart phone and the tablet computer.
And we have a front row seat.

Th irony is not lost that the people who swear that “cell phones in the hands of today’s middle and high school kids is a poor idea” are the same people who would be professionally neutered if you took away their own cell phones.

Is fear of texting really a sufficient reason to ban cell phones? We don’t ban pencil and paper just because the kids may write notes to one another and doodle.

Yet, by this same logic, we ban cell phones. (A ban, which BTW, is hardly working. Kids HAVE cell phones. And their parents are the ones who most often bought these phones for them.) It just seems smarter to teach them how to wisely use the devices as opposed to trying make the students of today “put that thing away before I take it!”
Having a keen facility with these devices is going to eventually be really, really, critical for the students of tomorrow

In fact, in many ways, it already is for the most cutting edge students of today. Let’s harness the educational power of technology instead of suppressing it. Times have changed and the phone of even 3 years ago is not the phone of today.

And in a sign that the world of education just became even more dystopian, I offer you this article… a piece about how real teachers can now cut their teeth and practice being a teacher on virutal students.

As the article says (cause, you can’t make this up), “such simulations give teachers in training the ability to experiment—and make mistakes—without the worry of doing harm to an actual child’s learning.”

Without the worry of doing harm to the child’s learning? I’ve spent 10 minutes trying to come up with a snappy way to mock this nonsense when it just dawned on me… I don’t even understand what that phrase means!

So if I make a mistake at the front of the room – I misquote a famous poet, fail to properly illuminate a missing comma, and so on – I am “doing harm to a child’s learning”?

Of course, I don’t want to be a cynic, but if you read the article they open with an example of a teacher wrestling with some classroom management issues.

The student-teacher faces a rowdy class.

“We’re not going to have that kind of behavior in here,” she says. “It’s too loud in here to move on.”

The students don’t pay much attention. A boy in the back row, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, slumps his shoulders. Another student waves his hand aimlessly.
“Nah, just stretching,” he replies, when the teacher asks if he needs something.

Indeed, sounds like rough stuff. I mean, oh my goodness, those computer kids really seem to talk back, too. Heavens-to-Betsie’s, what in the world is an educator to do?

I wonder if the avatar kids do any of the following:

• fart
• laugh when their friend farts
• falsely blame a non-farter for farting (all while making a big stink of the stink)

Okay, okay, a little decorum, please. The avatars, it’s safe to assume (and unlike very real kids), generate zero wind.

But I do wonder if they ever…

• walk into class crying because their alcoholic mother smashed their cell phone to smithereens 4 minutes before 1st period started.
• bounce into class simultaneously elated and terrified by the prospect of losing their virginity after school.

Do I need to go on?

Okay, it’s a good idea to be innovative but if we’re gonna bring avatars into education, why not flip the script, have an avatar teach a standards-based classroom lesson on the front video screen and have security guards with dogs patrol the room waiting to pounce at the slightest behavioral infraction? Security guards are cheaper than teachers, dogs don’t draw a paycheck or a pension and, as we all know, central command can then script the lessons while bubble tests can assess the performance.

Now the article which I mock does try to buttress itself with buzzwords and fancy sounding terms such as “there are 2 million discreet combinations possible.”

But these are not real kids! And are we not teaching educators if we dare to pre-service them with avatars instead of real kids, that there really is not difference between computer generated children and REAL children? Plus, what message are you sending to these soon-to-be instructors?

• We’ve discounted the value of humanity so much that we believe we can replicate the actions, feelings and behavior of real children?
• We are so confident that personhood can be imitated through 0′s and 1′s that as soon as we figure out how to simply replace you, the classroom teacher, with 1′s and 0′s, we are gonna pull your plug?

Are fake kids ever real kids? Doctors warm up for surgery using simulations to lock in and “get loose”. I get it. Doctors using avatars to replicate bedside manners when they have to relate news of a terminal illness?

It’s soul-less. And teaching, like medicine, police work, nursing, DMV work, and on and on and on, if it’s ever going to be any good, must have soul.

So here’s a funny story that I just heard as I was travelling across the country doing PD for some schools on the east coast.

Airplane seats on bigger planes typically come 3 to a row. And really, who wants to be in the middle seat? Diminutive people, we all assume, endure it best. Big boned folks (i.e. behemoth tubs-o’-goo) dread it
most.

(Save the hate mail, peeps, I am joking! Besides, we all hate the middle seat. Stick figure waifs to NFL lineman, no one likes the middle seat, especially when you are forced to wedge in between strangers… which brings me back to my story.)

So say you are a parent travelling with a 4 year old on an airplane who has two tickets, one for an aisle seat and one for a middle seat. Which one are you gonna choose for yourself?

The aisle, naturally. Plus, if you know anything about 4 year olds, to put them on the aisle means that you will, at some point, inevitably be chasing them up the aisle for half the flight.

Giving your kid the middle seat on an airplane is simply good parenting. It keeps ‘em fenced in.

So the 4 year boy, sitting in the middle seat in this story, sees the man sitting in the window seat of his row take out his laptop computer. And the boy, innocently enough, when the gent opens his laptop, reaches over and “wipes” the computer screen.

Nothing happens. The boy looks puzzled. So he reaches over and “wipes” it again.

And again, nothing.

And then he does it a third time. At this point the dad reaches over and holds down his son’s arm, non-verbally communicating to his child the idea, “Please don’t do that.”

The son looks up at his father and says, “Daddy, his computer’s broken.”

The man in the window seat then looks up and the dad, apologizing for his kid’s “wiping” smiles with a slightly embarrassed look on his face. He then proceeds to explain that he owns an iPad and his son thinks
that all computers should allow wiping as does his iPad.

Moral of this story: to a 4 year old, the laptop computer on which I typed this blog post today is already “broken”.

Times they are a changin’.

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!

Last night after putting my daughter to sleep, I spent a long time writing a blog for today. Actually, it was too long. I’d spent over 45 minutes on it and knew it needed to be trimmed down or converted into a two-part piece, something like that.

See, I want to start adding in a little more about how I, as an author, write. The process of authoring a book, the ins-n-outs, the behind the scenes, from idea to page to literary agent to sale to publisher to bookstores. Looking behind the curtain at this process feels like it might have relevance to teaching ELA and I suspect there might be much to be mined in terms of making connections from the toils of a professional author to those of the student author — as they are really more closely related than most kids probably imagine.

It was a goodie, too. Really meaty.

Then my wife zapped it.

45 minutes worth of work gone-zo. I went to go score some jellybeans from the kitchen cabinet (the ones she’s been hiding from me cause I’ve been eating too many as of late… in her opinion) and she wanted to take a look at something on Web MD since everyone in our house right now has a bit of a tickle in their throat. So she opened a new tab and read a few pieces of info while I covertly munched some orange little droplets of love in the other room. Then, when she was done, she closed out ALL tabs on the computer.

Not just Web MD but all the tabs… and a heck of a lot of thoughtful work of mine went bye-bye.

So for today, it’s kinda like the dog ate my digital homework. I am frustrated that I have to do it again — and it will almost assuredly be different — but the thing is, stuff happens, right? At first I was steamed, aggravated and so on but the fact is, it was my fault, not hers. I could have “saved it as a draft”. I could have backed it up somehow. I could have taken steps to make sure I didn’t lose the material before I got up from my seat to go satisfy my sweet tooth.

But I didn’t. But what I did do right after that was make sure I backed up every file on my computer to an external hard drive because losing 45 minutes worth of work is one thing — but losing an entire computer’s worth of work is something else entirely.

After all, who doesn’t have scores of irreplaceable pictures, lesson plans, writing and so forth on their computer? So in my small pain let their be a great lesson to all who have read this today: BACK YOUR STUFF UP!

Remember, the time to fix your roof is when the sun is shining.

And now, if you’ll forgive me, I have to go apologize to my wife for my outburst. There are two reasons for this. 1) I flew off the handle a bit and 2) cause if I don’t she’s gonna hide the damn jellybeans where I’ll never, ever find them again.