Ideas

I've been thinking lately about the problem with schools (actually, I've been thinking about that since at least the 6th grade). I'm still trying to refine the argument, but I think it comes down to the fact that there is no so much information in the world that is ever-rapidly being produced that old ideas of learning "the basics" just don't make sense anymore. It used to be that you could learn how to design bridges, heal the sick, or, maybe build cars (probably using very few skills that you learned in school) and be set. Now, however, the job that you'll be doing in five or ten years, especially if you are a high school senior, probably doesn't exist.

Note: I have no idea what I'm talking about. I've been out of the classroom for over a decade and do not really study professional development.

It's seemed to me for a long time that one problem with teaching as a profession is that unlike most professions, the jobs of a novice teacher and the jobs of a veteran teacher are almost exactly the same. You go in your room, close the door, and teach, coming out only to go to the bathroom and maybe listen to your more poisonous colleagues gripe in the teacher lounge. In most other professions when you start you do sort-of ramp up to being a full-fledged participant. My (again nascent) understanding of becoming a lawyer is that when you start, you're not typically given your own cases to try in front of a judge yourself. Instead you work with a mentor who does the heavy lifting while you learn the ropes. By the time you go to court by yourself, you've been a number of times already, know the judge, and how things work. If you're good and work hard, you eventually become a partner in the firm, fully vested in its success and the training of new lawyers. (To me the analogy of tenure for a college professor and becoming partner for a lawyer is apt, but it does not at all seem analogous to my understanding of tenure in K-12 public schools.)

Synopsis: A student took two sets of classes to learn to create web pages. The results were, uh, disappointing. The same student used Tripod and GooglePages to create web pages. The results were rather impressive. Let's stop mistreating teachers by suggesting that they should know anything about web design.

A continual question that we who think that computers can and will make a big difference---and improvement---in how people teach and learn in schools have to consider is why have we not seen these big gains? As Cuban and others point out, we have networked virtually every classroom in the country and have more computers what do we have to show for it? Where's the revolution? This piece proposes several answers to that question and some ways to jump-start the revolution.