Professors, Stop Your Microchips
An Article Against Technology in the Classroom By Patrick Allitt

Chalk and Talk
A Rebuttal to the Article by Doug Rowlett, PH.D.

It seems that Mr. Allitt is describing, in part, the same old problem that education has always had to deal with throughout the centuries. If I may borrow a term from the computer dinosaur age, the problem he is describing is GIGO, i.e., garbage in, garbage out. Professors who are inept at teaching will be inept no matter whether they have computers or chalk in the classroom, and of course those who are inept at dealing with technology will botch it and thus have more than their share of distractions in class.

And yes, technology that malfunctions will cause distractions -- hey, anyone remember the fingernail screeching of chalk on the board, or the broken chalk falling all over the floor, or the fans that when turned on made it impossible to hear the prof or to keep your notes on the desk? How about the pencil that broke or the pen that ran out of ink during note taking? Weren't those technology failures? Didn't they cause distractions?
Mr. Allitt complains that students browse their e-mail or the web in class. So what? I used to pass notes in class, too. Those who want to goof off will do so, regardless of the tech level of the classroom. I browse my e-mail in meetings, too -- thank God for wireless or I might just die of boredom. Teachers: If YOU'RE interesting, then THEY'LL be interested. If they're bored, it's because . . . TADAH! . . . you're boring.

Students don't know grammar? Hooooboy! Mr. Allitt is right on the head with that hammer. And you think that 15 years ago, before there was a world wide web and before computers in the classroom, they knew grammar? If you do, then I'd like some of what you're smoking, please.

E-mail? Let's see, it promotes less "contact" -- howzat? Could it be that the way contact is defined is the problem here, and that students are demanding more, not less ("why haven't you answered my e-mail yet?") contact, only the meaning of the word has changed and the "old geezer" is balking at stepping up the pace and keeping abreast of developments in the field of education, preferring, instead, to continue doing things the way they were done when HE was in school? Wasn't that our complaint about our parents? Wasn't that their complaint about THEIR parents? Mr. Allitt, do you hear the echo of your parent’s words coming out of your own mouth?

Have you ever heard the cliché "You're only as old as you feel?" Well, Mr. Allitt really is old because he feels old and thinks old. "How much better the class would have been . . .” he sighs. Better? No, just more comfortable for Mr. Allitt. Yep, and I bet he would have enjoyed the softer and more golden light of kerosene lamps, and his trip to school would have been so much more pleasant in a buggy without all those dreary autos stinking things up and clogging the roads, too. And who really needs central air conditioning anyway?

But the world doesn't stand still for any of us, and the really sad thing about the present state of affairs in education which Mr. Allitt is refusing to accept is that our students have adopted new technologies with more ardor than anything else we have ever seen, and they are leaving us farther and farther behind as we continue to cling with bitter passion to our irrelevancy rather than taking a good hard look at their world and seeing if there's something there we can use to reach them.

So, like Mr. Allitt, we say to our students by our manner and our actions, "Everything you are enthusiastic about sucks. Everything you hold valuable has no value. Everything you pursue is trivial. You have no standards. You are ignorant and lazy. But, hey, let's talk!" And then we wonder why they tune us out and turn us off. Must be they have a problem, right? Couldn't be us.

The real food for thought in Mr. Allitt's whining little essay is the idea that we have failed utterly to adapt education to present needs. For example -- every student takes at least 15 years of English course, from K-14, right? And yet, we say they STILL can't read and write properly! Could it be that we are doing something wrong here? Might it be that we should STOP doing what we have been doing for decades and START doing something different? If you can't teach it to them in 15 years, then, DUH!, perhaps something's broken and needs repair.

Or maybe the teaching isn't what's wrong. Maybe it's the subject. Perhaps reading and writing aren't the only communication skills they need to master, and we fuddy-duddies devote ALL our time to proselytizing reading and writing, which they find increasingly irrelevant and worth maybe 20% (I'm being generous here) of their communication skills effort, and spend NO time on teaching them how to deal with, analyze, interpret, and use the other communication modes out there, such as images, videos, music, etc., the likes of which they find far more compelling and omnipresent in their environment that mere books.

As I see it, we can, like Mr. Allitt, sit on our piles of moldering old classics and shore up fragments against our ruins, ala Eliot, or we can recognize the new realities, acknowledge that reading and writing are important skills but not the only ones we need to work with, and get on with finding new ways to reach our students before they find us so incredibly antediluvian that they stop coming to our classes altogether. Note that the only reason they come now is because they have been told they will need a degree to get any kind of decent job in modern America. When we fail to teach them how to live in and cope with the real world and its new ways of doing things, then even that excuse will dissolve and we will wind up wondering where they all went.

Yes, we should all be ready and willing to pick up the chalk again if the computers fail or the projector bulb goes dim -- or at least the dry-erase markers, since chalk dust is anathema these days. And I think most of us can do that with little trauma, since we are so close chronologically to those days of dusty erasers and crabbed handwriting (on a board that most inconveniently had no lines) that Mr. Allitt evoked with such nostalgic excess as the golden age of education.

However, it won't be all that long before a new generation that has never known a chalk board (or dry erase board, for that matter) will be teaching, and then the technology will assume the importance and critical status of that most basic of necessities in our teaching world, the electric light. What do most of us do when the lights go out during class? We sit in the dark (because, of course, windows cost so much they just aren't a part of the modern classroom any longer) and, if the power doesn't come on in a reasonable amount of time, send our students home and tell them to come back the next class day. Some brave, romantic throwbacks will take their classes outside for a bit of Spencer in the grass, or something, but most will just accept the fact that without electric lights they can't (or won't) teach. To the next generation, the computer will have come to be just as important for most classes, and if the network fails or the projector dies, then it will be "see you later, ladies and gentlemen, come back tomorrow once the techies have sorted things out." Sure, a couple of eccentrics will tough it out and try to teach without all the mod cons, but they'll be the moony-eyed ones everyone always looks askance at and doesn't trust very much anyway.

Good teaching is, as we both have been at some pains to point out, good teaching, and it depends upon the teacher, not the technology. However, having said that, my point here is to emphasize that the teaching world is changing and the modern classroom will in a shorter time than any of us realize become a place where one wouldn't think of teaching at "professional" levels without the aid of higher technology, just as none of us today would consider even trying to teach our classes in rooms lit only by candles for longer than an agonizing hour imposed by emergency conditions.

Doug Rowlett, P.H.
HCC Southwest