it don’t matter
Every classroom at my mom’s school just got a DocuCamera. I am insanely jealous. We have them at the county office, so whenever I go in for workshops and conferences, I get to drool over them. Basically, a DocuCamera is a super fancy-schmancy overhead projector, except instead of all the complicated mirrors, it’s a camera. So rather than making overheads of a worksheet, I can just put the worksheet under the camera and the whole thing will be projected onto my wall in full color and everything. They are amazing.
At my school, we are basically in the technological Dark Ages. When I first got there, my computer sounded like it was trying to make a flight to the moon whenever I turn it on. Now, it growls during class. Growls. So loud that the kids ask me to turn it off because the can’t concentrate. I have an overhead projector (but no place to store it, so it sits in the middle of my classroom and I trip over it all day), but no LCD projector and the whole school is running on ancient PCs. Why there is even a single school in the entire world that is not running a Mac platform is beyond me, but I have to choose to work in an entire PC-based district (this means, of course, that any tech training I get is completely worthless).
I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the school-technology connection and how to bridge the gap between the technology that students use at home and the technology that we expect them to use for school. Our kids are fluent in computers, but not in the English language. Surely then, using computers as we instruct can only be helpful to our students, yet so many teachers (and schools, and districts even) are reluctant to bring the technology into the classroom and use it in a way that is meaningful to the students and that supports the acquisition of academic knowledge (i.e. not just “Learn how to set your margins to 1″ when you write an essay”).
My thoughts on tech-based teaching are still jumbled, so I’ll leave off here. However, I do just need to say that four of my 6th period students stayed after class today to work on their essays (or so they said, I suspect that only needed a little help, but really wanted an excuse to hang out) and I have never laughed so hard in my entire life. Some of these kids are just so great and after the week I’ve had, it was such a nice reminder of why I do what I do. For the kids. Not the other teachers who still don’t know my name, not the administrators who keep rescheduling my pre-observation conferences, not the support staff who keep butting into my room and telling me I’m doing my job wrong, not even the parents who don’t support their own child’s education. But for the kids. The ones who struggle and struggle and put in a good fight and try hard and make me laugh because, amazingly, they like me and they want me to like them. And they trust me. And they tell me when they’re fighting with their girlfriend, or think they might be pregnant, or they are afraid their mom’s boyfriend is selling drugs, or when they’ve just had a rough day. They ask me to come to their football games, and baseball games, and wrestling matches. They ask me to call their parents when they get an A and understand that I’ll call their parents when they get an F. And I think, deep down, they want to learn. I need to believe that. Everyday, I need to believe that.
