January 2010 Archives

From time to time, a reporter, prospective funder, or administrator will come to one of our classrooms for a site visit. Most often, the first questions will be addressed to the teacher, but, after awhile, the interviewer will turn to the students. Invariably, the first question to the students is "what do you like about TeacherMate?" Expecting the answer to be "it's fun!" the interviewer is always surprised when the response is either "it helps me learn to read" or "it helps me with math."

Suspicious that perhaps the activities are not as fun as they first appear, the interviewer will then ask: "which do you like more, TeacherMate or Nintendo?" Nine times out of ten, the student chooses TeacherMate.

Disbelief on the part of the interviewer ensues.

Trust these children. Playing at home, they prefer Nintendo. But they know when it's time for pure fun and when it's time for fun to be subservient to learning. They know how little they learn with workbooks or by sitting in the back of a large class, when they are bored and acting out.

Our goal as educators is to tap into a child's natural desire to learn; to stoke it, and make it habitual before that desire is snuffed out by the hardships of growing up, hardships which are accentuated in low income communities. Technology can serve that goal, if the program designers keep that goal in the top of their minds.

The kindergarteners and first grade students in the schools I was providing technical support to were just as endearing, full of energy and desire to learn as any you would meet anywhere. So many of the teachers were hardworking, engaged, warm and truly inspirational, and some evinced a patience and wisdom that are wondrous and rare wherever they are found. But some teachers were struggling, and their struggles were inscribed on the culture of their classroom.

Most of the schools I would enter would show signs of parents and educators doing their best with limited resources to make their school bright, fun, and stimulating, and to demonstrate to their children the commitment that the community feels for them. But some buildings told a different story. Temporary structures in constant use for decades, starving for maintenance, lacking resources, tell a story of the appalling negligence of the wider society. I think that the lesson that some students learn from that story is that the people outside the neighborhood really do not care about us, because they are really not a part of our community.

Some of the five-year-olds who joked with me in the classrooms I visited may be entering college soon. If so it says great things about their individual characters, their parents and the commited adults who taught and encouraged them. I would never claim that any educational technology program would have more than a modest supportive role in such an achievement, but just maybe just a little bump, making reading just a little easier, school a little more fun, giving the teacher a little help, a little extra time, tilted the trajectory and maybe the oddity of some strange guy from somewhere who kept showing up in the classroom, fixing the computers and leaving them with new games, might plant the suspicion in a child's mind that the community is larger than they ever imagined.

The first school that used our reading software was in the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago, which in the early 90's had deteriorated into one of the nation's worst urban slums. Cabrini Green has since experienced a rebirth with new housing and new facilities, but, back then there was unfathomable decay in every direction.

I would drive to the school in the morning, observe the students using our software, and then head downtown to my law firm's offices in the Loop financial center. One day, as I was getting into my car in the Cabrini Green parking lot, a particularly sad song started playing on the radio. The mood of the song resonated with the depressing surroundings.

I drove out of the school parking lot and proceeded down LaSalle Street. In less than five minutes, I arrived at the office parking lot in my firm's gleaming high-rise tower. What struck me so forcefully was that the same song was still playing on the radio. Only now, the song completely was at odds with the vibrancy of the Loop environment I had entered.

While I always knew that the poverty of Cabrini Green was physically near the wealth of the Loop, traveling between both places in the duration of one short song created a cognitive dissonance that has never left my head.

How can we in America, a country founded on equality, abide by this vast disparity among neighbors? What role can - and should -- education play in eradicating this inequality?