Just throw “technology” at it!

Technology is not the cure for all ills of our education system.1 But the approach that our society seems to have taken in trying to implement technology into our classrooms seems Draconian — at best — and is too often a corollary of the timeless “just throw money at the problem and it will go away” approach.2

The resulting paradigm of “oh you have a problem LET’S JUST THROW TECHNOLOGY AT IT” has given way to a toxic soup of a hot mess of technology tools that are available to educators. Which might sound fantastic, except for the fact that there is wayyyy too much stuff for most teachers to learn to use in the “spare time” that they already don’t have. And even when we have the time, new tools are often NOT the solution.

One example: Do you have people in your workplace that don’t know how to communicate with coworkers? Let’s throw technology at the problem, and purchase a fancy enterprise-grade software solution to tackle that! Unfortunately few will know how to use it, even fewer will want to use it, and at the end of the day, it wouldn’t even solve the root problem: that some people generally lack basic communication skills.

I could rant forever. It’s a classic case of education sans wisdom, or knowledge without character. Steve Jobs would often say that he wanted to be “at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.” But that’s so important, if you think about it: You can give anyone Picasso’s paintbrush — that doesn’t mean they’ll suddenly be able to start painting like Picasso.

I have always believed that if you’re going to throw resources at a problem in search of a solution, that it needs to be done in a thoughtful, well-planned manner.3

Okay, enough. </rant> Let’s shift gears.

This Summer, I plan to set aside some time to pursue a solution to a problem that actually plagues us teachers — in particular with AP Statistics, but surely for other subjects as well.

First, let me do my best to describe the “problem”.

In our district, high schools have four 90-minute class periods a day. In AP Statistics, we’ll use… oh, let’s say anywhere from 30 to 50 of those minutes tackling the lesson at hand — usually a mix of notes, lab activity, brief group discussion, but almost never straight lecture.4 Oh, if you’re wondering about the other 40 minutes or so, that is usually spent on going over homework (usually the first 10-15 minutes or so) and sometimes taking a quiz (12 minutes if it’s short, 25 minutes for a longer affair).5

So what happens when a student has to miss class?

Say, for a college visit?6 Or a golf tournament?7 Or a band trip? Or a ________? Well, on a lucky day I might capable of compressing the lesson down to about 15 minutes, but I could easily be out double or triple that if luck is not on my side.

Practically, this means that if 3 students miss class in a given week8 and ask me to help them get caught up, I’m out about 90 minutes or so of my personal time, and wishing that I could genetically clone myself to be in three places at once.9 (By the way, in spite of the fact that I teach “AP students”,10 telling kids who have to miss class to just “read the textbook” doesn’t usually fly well. Neither does the “this is what you’ll have to do in college” line — sounds good in theory, but if you want to switch places with me for a week to try it out, please ring me up, anytime.)

For a given week, three dedicated half-hour tutorial sessions might take up my entire week’s worth of before-and-after-school tutorial sessions.11 Spending time with students — wonderful students, may I add — precludes us from grading papers and planning lessons and doing other “teacher stuff”. And that precludes us teachers from having a life.12

Allow me to clear this up:

Having students that are willing to come in for tutorials to get caught up is NOT the problem. That is very much a GOOD THING — and it’s a “problem” that more teachers would love to have. The PROBLEM is simply that we don’t have 37 hours13 in a day.1415

In my four years of teaching AP Stat — which is by far the toughest “teach yourself” class of all the courses that I have taught16 — what with the large number of extracurricular activities that these “AP students”17 are involved in, this is by far the biggest “bottleneck” of our time.

Which got me and at least one other Stat teacher in the district to thinking… there has to be a better way that we can tackle this problem.18

So we have an idea — one that we begin work on tomorrow.19 Yes, tomorrow would mark exactly one week after the official start of our summer break.

And that’s one issue of coming up with good solutions for our classrooms: Good solutions take time to develop.2021

More summers than not, I have dedicated half of the break22 to working on the “drawing board” for the upcoming year. And while I’m no longer a huge fan of the idea, it’s looking like this will be one of those summers. Blegh! But the goal is for this to make our lives as teachers just a little bit easier moving forward — so hopefully it will be worth it come September.

1. Don’t even ask me to identify the “ills” of our education system. While we could discuss a myriad of “problems” that some would say need solving with regards to our educational system, that is a rabbit hole I wish NOT to descend into today, if ever. [↩]
2. The problem with which, of course, is that when you get to the end of the road, you often end up with the same problem and a lot less money [↩]
3. And not just for some higher-up to be able to put a checkmark in a box [↩]
4. Even with “AP students”, a straight 45-minute lecture would put ME to sleep, not to mention the 17 year-olds in the room. Which, by the way, brings me to a pet-peeve of mine: the way some people throw around the term “AP students”. Newsflash: they’re still kids! [↩]
5. It’s summer break so I’m too lazy to do the math but I think that roughly adds up… it usually does in the class and I’m going on that instinct [↩]
6. I do, in fact, teach mostly seniors [↩]
7. I actually had a kid last year complain to me that she had to miss class to play 36 holes of golf. Oh, the struggle. -_- [↩]
8. which is about typical [↩]
9. And NO, this is NOT the technological solution in question… though I have occasionally wished for this to be possible — usually during the brutal 4th six weeks of each year. [↩]
10. In this context, “AP students” means that these kids sincerely want to get caught up on what they missed. Translation: you can’t just ignore them. [↩]
11. On paper, we’re usually available for more than that, but things tend to come up more than us teachers would like. [↩]
12. We can argue if I’d have a life anyway some other day. [↩]
13. I just made that number up [↩]
14. Not having a life is really just a side-effect of not having 37+ hours in a day. Maybe. I suppose creating clones of ourselves might help, but let’s be practical. Not that having 37 hours in a day is practical… [↩]
15. Well this is a real problem for teachers in general, probably for many other professions as well if I were to ask around, right? [↩]
16. which, in the high school ranks, really only excludes Calculus [↩]
17. there’s that lovely phrase again! [↩]
18. and perhaps deal with other problems that we haven’t even yet considered, while we’re at it. [↩]
19. But don’t get excited: it’s just a seedling of an idea at this juncture. Quite plausible that nothing comes of it. [↩]
20. Good exams take time to develop. I may write a post someday about the process of writing a good exam… for me, those things usually go through multiple rough drafts. [↩]
21. and if you know anything about my personality, I don’t like crappy solutions. [↩]
22. July 4 weekend is usually the start/end point [↩]