Math Stories

This was originally intended to be a comment on another blog, but it had trouble posting, and it's a decent enough story (though the moral is a bit ambiguous).

I love technology when it works. I hate it when it doesn't. The thing is, when technology works, I don't use it per se, it's just there and does its job. When I have to think about using it, that already means that it's starting to not work.

(That's part of why I love Macs, now that OS X has stabilized. I'm an ex software engineer. I'm used to banging out a perl script or a shell script or a find command when I want to do something. I love unix as a power user. I never could stand the arcane sysadmin stuff, though. If I never have to look at fstab again it'll be too soon. My Macs make all that stuff invisible to me, while keeping the unix powerhouse at my fingertips along with all the other pretty easy to do stuff.)

How does this apply to school? We're constantly being urged to adopt "technology", yet the ways it's pushed almost always seems to get in the way, rather than make our lives easier.

I've recently seen the other side of this problem.

Our school was nice enough to provide every teacher (theoretically) with a laptop and a projector. I didn't get the laptop, but i did get the projector.

I spent some of my own cash, and (a) got a document camera, and (b) got the hardware to ceiling mount the projector and run the cables. The end result: not much more than a fancy overhead system, with the following exceptions:

- The projector was out of the way - I rarely blocked the source when I moved around, and I didn't get it in my eyes.
- The projector never got misaligned - the image on screen was always perfectly square and on center
- (this is the big difference) I didn't need transparencies - I could just put any piece of readable material under the camera and have it projected.

That last thing made a big difference in my teaching style - I'd just grab students work and put it up, rather than trying to demonstrate everything myself, or wait for them to laboriously copy it to a transparency.

So, to bring this back to how technology is pushed:

My principal drops in for a visit. He sees me do the grabbing student work thing, and the students engaged, decides right then and there that the whole school needs the same setup i've got.

The problem is, I didn't teach that way because of the setup. I built that setup to accommodate the way I teach. Other teachers who'd stopped by my classroom who had seen it in action were excited by the prospect. Teachers who hadn't seen it had could care less, and saw the whole new setup thing as something else they had to accommodate in their schedules.

The lesson from this is twofold:

1) As Dan says - you need to build excitement before you provide the materials. Focus on the motivation - otherwise you're just making their job more difficult without getting better response.

2) Professional development consists too much of people telling other people how to do something. That doesn't work in our classrooms, and it doesn't work for pd. What we need is to see success in action, with real students. I get a lot more excited when I see students engaged in real learning than I do when someone just tells me about it.

(There is irony here - as a result of the setup, I got the laptop finally. It is too much of a pain in the butt to switch between Keynote and the document camera, so I've stopped using a very powerful tool because - hah - the technology had gotten in the way.)