Community

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.