Digital resistance is multi-generational

A teacher recently advocated for a student who wishes to stop using her school issued Chromebook and return to paper and pencil to do her assignments. I had heard reports earlier in the year from high school math teachers who went totally paperless that there were students who asked that they could get paper handouts and turn in homework on paper. Surveys show up now and then proclaiming that younger people prefer reading print books to reading ebooks.

When we think of resistance to change in schools, it is usually the adults who come to mind. Nudging, encouraging, mandating, cajoling, bribing, (not yet resorted to blackmailing), I've worked for 30 years to get teachers and administrators communicating, record-keeping, and teaching with digital tools in ways that benefit students. While one is unlikely to encounter a paper grade book or 16mm film in schools today, our digital tools are still pretty much doing analog tasks.

So should we in education re-think this whole digital conversion effort?

A couple phrases we use in our district's planning and mission statements are "real-world ready" and "future ready." And I believe those should be more than simply rhetoric. In order for our students to be real-world ready, they need to be confident in their ability to use "real world" tools - computers, spreadsheets, planning tools, productivity software, communication devices and apps. When Jenny and Carlos get their first engineering jobs, I do not believe they will have the choice of a drafting table or CAD/CAM on a computer.

If we allow students to opt out of using digital tools in their K-12 education, we are doing them a disservice.

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When in doubt, be kind

                   ...Oh friends, take
whatever kindness you can find
and be profligate in its expenditure:
It will not drain your limited resources,
I assure you, it will not leave you vulnerable
and unfurled, with only your sweet little claws
to defend yourselves, and your wet little noses,
and your eyes to the ground, and your little feet.

“Be Kind” by Michael Blumenthal

My poor son-in-law, a pastor of the UCC, comes as close to a spiritual advisor as I have. He advised always giving to panhandlers when I queried him on the topic. Give. Just give without exception or hesitation.

So when the president of St Catherine University in St Paul shared this editorial from the March 5 edition of the New York Times, I was pleased to see that Aaron and Pope gave the same advice: just give.

 

The Pope and the Panhandler

New Yorkers, if not city dwellers everywhere, might acknowledge a debt to Pope Francis this week. He has offered a concrete, permanently useful prescription for dealing with panhandlers. 

It’s this: Give them the money, and don’t worry about it.

The pope’s advice, from an interview with a Milan magazine published just before the beginning of Lent, is startlingly simple. It’s scripturally sound, yet possibly confounding, even subversive. Living in the city—especially in metropolises where homelessness is an unsolved, unending crisis—means that at some point in your day, or week, a person seeming (or claiming) to be homeless, or suffering with a disability, will ask you for help. You probably already have a panhandler policy. You keep walking, or not. You give, or not. Loose coins, a dollar, or just a shake of a head. Your rule may be blanket, or case-by-case. If it’s case by case, that means you have your own on-the-spot, individualized benefits program, with a bit of means-testing, mental health and character assessment, and criminal-background check—to the extent that any of this is possible from a second or two of looking someone up and down.

Francis’ solution eliminates that effort. But it is by no means effortless. Speaking to the magazine Scarp de Tenis, which means Tennis Shoes, a monthly for and about the homeless and marginalized, the pope said that giving something to someone in need is “always right.” (We’re helped here by the translation in an article from Catholic News Service.) But what if someone uses the money for, say, a glass of wine? (A perfectly Milanese question.) His answer: If “a glass of wine is the only happiness he has in life, that’s O.K. Instead, ask yourself, what do you do on the sly? What ‘happiness’ do you seek in secret?” Another way to look at it, he said, is to recognize how you are the “luckier” one, with a home, a spouse and children, and then ask why your responsibility to help should be pushed onto someone else.

Then he posed a greater challenge. He said the way of giving is as important as the gift. You should not simply drop a bill into a cup and walk away. You must stop, look the person in the eyes, and touch his or her hands. The reason is to preserve dignity, to see another person not as a pathology or a social condition, but as a human, with a life whose value is equal to your own.

This message runs through Francis’ preaching and writings, which always seem to turn on the practical and personal, often citing the people he met and served as a parish priest in Argentina. His teaching on divorced and remarried Catholics has infuriated some conservative critics who accuse him, unfairly, of elevating compassion over doctrine. His recent statements on refugees and immigrants are the global version of his panhandler remarks—a rebuke aimed directly at the rich nations of Europe and at the United States. America is in the middle of a raging argument over poor outcasts. The president speaks of building walls and repelling foreigners. That toxic mind-set can be opposed in Washington, but it can also be confronted on the sidewalk. You don’t know what that guy will do with your dollar. Maybe you’d disapprove of what he does. Maybe compassion is the right call.

Were I to form a religion (heaven forbid - so to speak), I would have kindness be its most basic tenet. You honor your god by treating all her/his/its creations with kindness whether they be animal, vegetable, or mineral. Pretty simple - the one commandment - Be Kind.

Were I ever to find myself homeless, the first thing I would do is get a scruffy dog. My solicitations would be not for me, but for my canine companion. I bet I'd get more donations than my fellow bums.

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BFTP: Parent portals - are we encouraging helicopter parenting?

Our school has provided a parent portal to our student information system data for a dozen years now. Using a browser or mobile app, parents can view current grades, attendance, work completion, and other data on their children.

All good, yes?

As the father of a child whose idea of satisfactory school performance and his teachers' were often at odds, I would have found such a resource invaluable. While I never did my son's work for him, I always saw my parental role as doing quality control and assuring school work came before recreation. Good access to information about my son's academic performance would have helped me do a better job of both those tasks.

"Homework all done? Grades good? Projects complete?"

"All good, Dad, so let me get back to my video game."

I don't think my son ever deliberately misled me about how he was doing in school. I just think he was a little clueless at times. As a parent, I could have done a better job cluing him in if I knew how he was doing on an ongoing basis rather than just a parent-teacher conferences or report card times.

But helicopter parenting seems to be a growing epidemic. Dictionary.com defines it as:

a style of child rearing in which an overprotective mother or father discourages a child's independence 
by being too involved in the child's life: In typical helicopter parenting, a mother or father swoops in 
at any sign of challenge or discomfort.

Where does good parenting end and helicopter parenting begin? Does access to student performance data in real time encourage overparenting? Are we doing our kids an injustice by not allowing the chips to fall where they may when work is missing or badly done? Or are we neglecting our role as responsible adults if we don't insist our children put work before leisure and work to the best of their abilities*?

Any good guidelines for how access to student data can be used responsibly?

* In an ideal world, homework would be so engaging and meaningful, children would happily pursue it before any other activity. I am not holding my breath waiting for this to become the norm.

Original post March 12, 2012