Schools' Technological Progression

I sometimes forgot how young I actually am, and there are moments in my life where my age shows through. The other day it dawned on me that I am part of an exclusive group--a group is one that doesn’t remember the days before cellphones. I do not know when exactly cellphones were invented or became more attainable, but I do know that as long as I’ve been alive, they have been around. I also realized my lack of age talking to my mother. She starting talking about what I’m going to call a party landline. Essentially, your neighbors could hear your conversations if they picked up the phone while you were chatting with somebody else. I can’t imagine that: a life with no cellphones, not to mention life with a landline that’s not even exclusively your own. Not to mention, emails have also been around my entire life, but that’s pretty new as well. Back in the old days, where there were cars with carburetors, you had to send mail through the post office. I honestly do not even know how to send a letter, and I do not feel bad about it. I will practically never need to send a letter, and that is the future of most kids across the United States.

Technology has been moving at warp speed for a while now, and it is not intending on slowing down anytime soon. Communication is at an all-time high, and that is pretty awesome for the most part. What is interesting, though, is the lack of progress schools are taking to advance forward in a world that is racing past it. Before I get too far into this, I do not think an excess of technology is appropriate in a classroom, but there is a time and a place. I am avidly against a lot of technology in classrooms with exceptions to a few outliers. Classrooms are stuck in the 80’s with a whiteboard and a lesson that takes way too long, especially when students are having instant gratification on smartphones faster than ever before. Lecturing for a whole class period does not work, it bores the students. We all remember that one class we hated due to a teacher who did this, and for whatever reason nine out of ten times it always seemed to be some STEM class. Not always, this is more my opinion than an absolute set in stone fact, but it seemed that way.

It is important to make good use of technology in the classroom, as it can greatly enhance learning. In order to introduce a topic, there is a big array of things that the teacher can do, and technology often times helps. There are websites like Desmos that allow for teachers to make presentations that engage students and make them actually think. It allows for a students to actually be interested in math instead of just being lectured. With that being said, when it does come time for students to really learn the topic and not just be introduced to it, lectures do help a fair bit.

All in all, technology can be used as a tool to keep kids interested and engaged in the classroom. To me, engagement is the difference between a good teacher and a great teacher.

Crises Foster Innovation

There has been a lot going on in the past couple weeks.

Colleges and universities all over the U.S., as well as worldwide, have been closed. Public schools in 30 states, with the count continuously rising, have closed their doors. This leaves more than 50 million kids from elementary to high school at home without structure and sometimes supervision during the day.

This can be so overwhelming to think about and I completely sympathize with peoples’ fears, but the way that teachers have responded and reacted gives me so much hope.

Crises foster innovation.

For teachers of a traditional learning classroom, online applications may have never been used. Teachers in schools without one-to-one access have rarely had to help students with using laptops or tablets.

This can be seen as a hardship, or as an opportunity.

Now is the time to develop the amazing technology that we have into our daily classrooms.

Now is the time to learn the right and wrong ways to use online classrooms, video chats, and other online connections. 

Now is the time to work on flexibility with students who may have other obligations during this time.

Now is the time to create deeper connections with your students as we all go through this together.

This time will not only test our knowledge, but our character. How we adapt to these circumstances will affect students’ perception of schooling and can affect our own perceptions of our classrooms in the future.

Let us take this time as a chance to delve deeper into our teaching methods. Why only use lecture and homework methods? What are the benefits to using technology and different ways of communication in your classroom?

This will not last forever, but what we make of this time can!

Letter Chasing Vs Learning

This topic is one that hits close to home for me, and it is one that I do not look forward to dealing with when I am a teacher. Before I go on I must admit that I am very guilty of being a letter chaser. A letter chaser is someone who goes to school with the mindset of putting more emphasis on getting an A rather than learning the material. After my four years of high school and now into my second year of college I have learned the power of learning instead of chasing the letter.

From the very beginning of high school I was always told that A’s were the goal, and doing the extra work would pay off in the long run. Well this might be true, and I am not so naive to think that grades don’t play a factor in getting into colleges and other life impacting areas such as scholarships and awards. However, in this post I hope to give you a different mindset the next time you find yourself chasing the letter.

Like I mentioned above, I am a letter chaser. I am your stereotypical 4.0 GPA highschooler who did everything right. I thought that getting the 4.0 would make me feel great and accomplished, but if I were to give any high schooler advice today, I would tell them to not even look at their GPA. I know you think I am crazy! I spent hours a night studying, and I definitely missed my fair share of highschool sporting events because of this. It’s times like this where I wish I could go back and tell myself to go to that basketball or football game because highschool is a time where teenagers make memories and you sure can’t brag to you kids about how much time you spent studying! 

Another angle on this topic that has affected my life is the emphasis on learning. Everyone knows that once you take a test that you can just forget all that information and start storing the new material for the next test right? WRONG! Why do we even go to school? Is it to get the A in the class or is it to learn the material. An example of this in my life is in high school my math teacher let us use notes, calculators, and a unit circle on all the tests. Well if you are dedicated enough to take the time to take good notes, you don’t need to learn the material for the tests. When you end up going to a college where they outlaw calculators and expect you to know your unit circle, the game gets a whole lot harder. (Moral of the story: Know the Unit Circle!)

My third and final point in arguing against chasing the letter is just being prepared for real life. Yes, I agree that getting a good GPA might get you a job interview over someone else. However, the interviewer can already see and expect that anyone with the degree to know the material that is associated with that degree. So in an interview when all I can share are my stories on how I studied really hard, I can see how I would not be the best candidate for the job. I even see it here in college where I know super smart people who will land every interview they apply for but they may not land the job. My advice, don’t spend all your time for the interview, spend more time for the job.

To finish off this long winded rant; yes, I agree with you that getting good grades is important! They can get you into college and maybe get you some scholarships. I just hope the next time you are sitting at the end of the semester begging to get your grade rounded up that you remember the reason why we are all in school. And that reason is to LEARN!
Finally, as a future teacher, I hope my students can take pride in the failures and the stumbles that come along with school. To end in a cheesy quote, “You learn more from failure than you ever do from success.” Happy Learning!