Tom Sawyer's Fence

I first have to comment on Dave's introductory remarks to Session 7, most notably: "We have to teach (students) how to evaluate content for style as well as truth," and "In this post-typographic society, we continue to favor print." Regarding the evaluation of content, we should keep in mind that the traditional sources of "truth," as our generation grew up assuming them to be, may be the worst sources on which to rely. For instance, anybody who expects to find the truth from the White House or the Pentagon, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or many other media outlets, including periodicals with both liberal and conservative biases, will surely be left wanting. Finding "truth" in contemporary society is akin to listening to two children tell their versions of why they got into a fight and then trying to piece together some semblance of reality. As for continuing to favor print, please back off all of you contemporary Guy Montags of the world. Print media may still be the best and most reliable format. Anybody who gets frustrated with downloading (or is it uploading?) text on Adobe Acrobat Reader, and then scrolling up and down, backways and sideways, just to get the entire copy on the screen will probably agree. Give me print anytime.
Regarding the pod and vodcasts, maybe the so-called educational cognoscenti, those who brought us the whole-language approach, open classrooms, "the new math," heterogenuous classroom groupings, advisory periods, and a host of other worst practices may have unwittingly stumbled upon something of genius with these pod and videocasts. If it were up to the advocates of these practices, students will spend large chunks of the day in front of either a computer or television screen, and maybe the "experts" are onto something. While whitewashing a fence, Tom Sawyer figures out that work is what a body is "obliged to do," and manipulates his buddies into doing the loathsome task for him. On that premise, if we require students to spend up to six hours a day looking at either a computer or televsion screen, then just maybe when they get home from school they will be tired of the activity, forget that it was once fun, and want to either get exercise, read print media, or both.
In a 2007 survey, the National Endowment of the Arts concluded that teenagers are reading less and for shorter periods of time than at any other time in history, and one of the factors is either the time they spend on computers or in front of televisions. The National Wildlife Federation found that teenagers now spend an average of 44 hours a week staring at electronic screens. Naturally, the best solution to these disturbing trends is to force-feed them television in the classroom. According to the Television Goes to School article, "Watching television may seem a very simple act, but it actually involves a rather complicated thinking process," and "because brains are programmed to remember experiences that have an emotional component, television has a powerful ability to relay experience through the emotions evoked by images." I'm not even going to argue these two points; they may be perfectly valid. But the assumptions that reading and writing do not involve much more complicated thinking processes than watching television and that books do not evoke powerful emotional experiences have to be patently wrong. The percentage of students who can read proficiently in the school district where I teach is only between 62 and 66 percent. By all means, bring on the videocasts and the television shows. What's reading got to do with literacy?
Speaking of which, I have to wonder about all this emphasis on the "21st Century Literacies" when, according to an article in American Educator magazine entitled "Teaching English Language Learners: What the Research Does - and Does Not - Say," 1 in 9 students in today's public schools either does not speak English at all or does with enough limitations that he or she cannot fully participate in mainstream English instruction. Demographers also predict that the number of English Language Learners in public classrooms will increase to 1 in 4 in the next 20 years. It sounds to me like before we dive headlong into 21st Century literacies, we should first try to master those that characterized the 16th Century. Consider me a supporter of blogs and wikkis. If they promote and foster reading and writing, despite the logistical and technical difficulties (120 students, one classroom computer, two overbooked computer labs), I'm all for them, and I intend to utilize them as much as feasibly possible. Regarding the Boob Tube, you're going to have to go further to convince me. In the meantime, I'm hoping that obligating students to watch television and stare into computer screens at school will motivate them to turn those same devices off when they go home. Somehow, I'm not convinced it will happen, though.
June 30, 2008 9:24 AM