wide-eyed

The last time I went to a Teacher’s College at Columbia’s Calendar Day, where they re-present material related to their elementary curriculum’s reading and writing units of study, which was widely adopted by NYC schools under Chancellor Joel Klein in 2003, I sat in the back feverishly typing up my notes on my personal computer (no, teachers cannot take ‘personal computing’ expense deductions) so that I may turn-key upon my return to school.

It appeared ridiculous to me that all of the other 50 or so teachers present were doing the same thing, and many of them were handwriting them, only to have to go home and type them up in order to share and/or place them in a school binder. Much of what were copying down was presented to us on an overhead. At one point, a teacher raised her hand and asked why these overheads were not provided to us as handouts. After all, wasn’t the Dept. of Ed. still in a contractual agreement with TC? Plus our schools were now paying around $200 a head to send us to these events, on top of the cost of our substitute coverages. The reply was short and not so sweet: we can’t make copies anymore. When pressed for further explanation, the presenter quickly made her way back to the overhead – averting the conversation, and giving us more already-typed-material to copy down, and later re-type.

Since becoming a teacher in 2003, I have never heard the idiom “reinventing the wheel” as much as I have in the last four years. It’s almost as if it’s a motto, and yet uttered with mounting disdain. It can be hard to understand how education has missed the boat – the one that set out to flatten rather than round the earth. After conducting a survey at my school, most teachers didn’t feel comfortable using a computer. I would have to say part of the reason is because they don’t have to. Not enough has been digitized, and what has, hasn’t been integrated on a wide scale. Schools vary widely, and some are much more digitized than others, but TC curriculum is a good example because elementary schools all around NY are using it.

When I became a teacher, I was given a stack of TC lessons, which were stamped with “draft”. The stack was probably half a foot thick. I set about hole-punching them, dividing them by subject and then decided if “The Binder” was going to stay at home or not. It ended up at home for weekend planning, but couldn’t go with me a coffee shop and I didn’t have it at school for grade planning meetings. Since the first version, other more recent versions have circulated. I even finally got some copies of a bilingual version. But those originals stamped “draft” have never been fully replaced in hard copy.

At a TC training last year, someone asked if we could get some of the stuff we were copying down somewhere. The presenter nonchalantly said it was on the TC web site, and every participating school had been given access to a portion of their site where the units and additional materials were listed. I had been teaching three years and that was the first time I had heard – and by the looks of others, I wasn’t the only one. I went home and tried it: no such user. The next day I asked our literacy coach, and she had never heard of it. Some months later I got a hold of a secret password (what’s the point of telling you, it’ll just become more secret). Then this year, some TC units were forwarded to me in an email from a friend at another school. I wanted to blast them out, but I don’t have everybody’s email. And it’s just not enough anyway: we still wouldn’t be able to share all of the additional materials we create.

It’s said that re-inventing the wheel can be an “important tool in the instruction of complex ideas” by “leaving the student to work out those key steps which embody reasoning characteristic of the field.” But the whole point of adopting a curriculum is to standardize instruction. Having information at our fingertips would only help drive instructional innovation within that framework. What we’re doing is actually more like reinventing the square wheel. Why isn’t the curriculum and its supplemental materials available to all participating schools online? Why doesn’t one person type up notes and post them for everyone? Why can’t we share the rockin’ organizers and other things we’ve created? It’s about time we flatten NYC schools with a digital platform.

Coming into the NYC School system three years ago when it was changing curriculum (yet again! teachers griped, and it wasn’t just because there’s resistance to change, but materials shifting and procurement is grueling and can take years), I was aghast at the materials being set out in the halls to be ‘removed.’ Removed meant being hurled by custodians into our school’s five dumpsters; and if teachers were unsuccessful in getting the weight shifted out of the building, it would be shifted into the closest unlocked closet, or grudgingly returned to their rooms – dead space to be endured yet another year.
I was overwhelmed by the prospect of cleaning out my first classroom (and every classrom since), especially once I began opening the closets and pulling things out. I found textbooks dating back to the 50s, canned food from another decade, a teacher’s change of clothes, a formaldehyde-drowned lizard in a canning jar… It wasn’t as if everything was grouped, either, so before I could do anything, I had to figure out what I had. After all, good materials shouldn’t just be thrown out, right? Well, I’ve come to find out that there’s not a whole lot of right about what goes down…to the dumps.

If those books that didn’t go the dumpsters haven’t been given out as supplements to your students (or their trash bins), your school might be taking part of the Dept. of Ed.’s new book buy back program. After making a request, someone will come around with a scanner and tell you the worth of the stacks. Problem is, four years into the curriculum change – at least for many elementary and middle school math programs – most books register that infinite number: zero. They’re not worth anything to the DoE because they can’t be sold. I don’t know who they sell them to, but I would guess their market is country-wide, so the USA has no use for them; they’re obsolete. And some of them are less than five years old.

Our school had someone come around with a scanner last week, and the few books that could be sold back were pulled out and stacked in the halls; the rejects were left in the closets. Apparently, someone would be around to box up the ones they’d buy, and then ‘remove’ the rest. The books to be boxed up are still sitting in the hall, and dwindling, as passersby grab one here and there. Where was the rest to go, I asked? Surely the DoE had a partnership with a non-profit to get these books to someplace in the world that could use them. The answer was: they’re dumped. No partnership, no recycling. What magic the act garbage is! Poof! Gone!

When I pressed the rep. about getting this books into someone’s hands who could use them, he said he might know of some organization doing something like that and he’d try and figure out and let me know. After all, he said, that would be better for them because it’s expensive to have someone come in and ‘remove’ texts to dumpsters. I was hoping he was going to say: it’s better for the world if we can find someone who wants them instead of just adding to PA’s landfills. I’m still waiting on his contact. If anyone knows of such an organization, please pass it on.

According to a letter from the Office of the State Comptroller, the DoE is allocated $57.30 in State aid for textbooks for each enrolled student; a total of $74.9 million for the 2005-06 school year. The DoE expended about $145 million
for textbooks during this same period. That’s a lot of dinero being cycled out to dumpsters. Then there’s the cost of garbage, which is immeasurable.

TakingItGlobal has been around for about five years. Located in Toronto, Canada, but with an online structure encouraging collaboration by youth and educators from around the world, it has garnered the support of big-time NGOs and corporate sponsors like UNESCO and UNICEF, Global Youth Action Network, Global Knowledge Partnership, Oxfam International Youth Parliament, Peace Child International, Youth Employment Summit, The Millennium Campaign, Chat the Planet, Digital Divide.

TIG is accessible in English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Russian, and youth collaborate around topics such as environment, social justice and human rights and poverty and globalization. They can create groups around issues like recycling, and begin discussions with youth from around the world interested in sharing their experience and strategies. Loads of other resources like podcasts, blogs, galleries, organizations and job opportunities, make it almost a hybrid of idealist.org and Amnesty International, but for youth.

TakingItGlobal expanded their reach to include a section for educators with its education initiative, largely funded by Microsoft, where educators can create a virtual classroom, share activities/lesson plans, discuss educational issues, and find TIGed events. The focus is to encourage student interaction with the rest of their site and global collaboration on planning and projects. Their tutorial makes it a whole lot more clear. What I wasn’t expecting to find were the dues: Individual Teacher, $29, Starter School (15 Teachers), $195 or $16.95/mo, Large School (100 Teachers) $495 or $44.95/mo., so don’t try to explore until you pay up! In its beginnings, there’s still opportunity to be a pioneer contributor!

Michael Furdyk, co-founder, says in the book Wikinomics, ‘It’s real participatory active learning. A teacher in Canada and a teacher in Nigeria can sign up, create a virtual classroom and assign students to group research projects, while the students can blog, post artwork, and collaborate on a wiki.’

Ever get blocked from pbskids.org, or even Google while at school? It can be entirely frustrating to plan a project around a site you come to find out can’t be accessed at your school, or can be accessed one day, but not the next.

There are a couple of ways to get around your school, district, region, city proxy settings–and apparently their blockages vary. You can try and take the “bottle neck” approach and appeal to your principal, who can fill out an online form requesting certain sites be unblocked (conversely, s/he can request the opposite), and wait. Or, you can listen to your students when they suggest ProxyJoe.com. One would argue that by using such a site, we are encouraging transgression. The site does say “Use it to access MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, Xanga, etc when you are behind a work or school network. 100% privacy guaranteed!” Not exactly what you want a student to do when they’re supposed to be researching primary documents.

But isn’t ProxyJoe what the Web2.0 hype is all about? Complete access for the masses. We can ban cell phones, line students up at metal detectors and have them check them in, or we work with technology’s growing pains by developing more open systems, such as expectations for cell phone use with clear consequences. Or, we can teach navigational discipline (a little technique I could work on myself). Greater suppression leads to greater unrest. There’s noting more enticing than using a cell phone to capture a video of an enraged teacher and putting in on YouTube, and of course the inversion of power–teachers couldn’t do the same of students–is hard to match. ProxyJoe is an example of the Web at it’s best: hacking toward a freer community. It may help students’ distraction, but it can also help teachers get their job done. There’s no way to block everything considered inappropriate anyway.

The Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins at the Museum of Natural History opens this month. Their new exhibition, which replaced the Hall of Biology and Evolution, is said to “combine for the first time anywhere the most up-to-date discoveries in the fossil record with the latest in genomic science to explore the most profound mysteries of humankind: who we are, where we came from, and what is in store for the future of our species.”