Journal: News & Comment

Self-fixing problems

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SiliconValley.com's Family Tech article "Many Teachers Lag Behind Net-Savvy Students" by Larry Magid reveals (surprise, surprise) that:

[...] students' educational use of the Internet occurs outside of the school day, outside of the school building (and) outside the direction of teachers [...] The most Internet-savvy students complained that `"teachers don't use the Internet in class or create assignments that exploit great Web material."

and that:

Most kids are digital, and most adults are analog. [...] for most teachers I've spoken with, the Internet is a tool, not a lifestyle. [...] For students it's much more. It isn't a machine at the library, it is the library. It's almost a matter of instinct. Ask a teacher or parent to look up a phone number and, chances are, they'll find a phone book. Ask a kid and they'll go to Switchboard.com or another directory Web page.

While true, it's a temporary phenomenon. When my wife started teaching high-school math ten years ago, she was 23. She's now the most senior math teacher at her school, and she looks up phone numbers both in the book and online, depending on where she is when she needs the information. Anyone starting a teaching job at 23 today will likely have had six or seven or eight years of Internet experience, not to mention a similar amount of mobile phone experience, and probably a lifetime's personal computer experience. It won't be long before those digital kids are the teachers -- it's already happening -- and this particular worry will go away.

Besides, my dad spends almost as much time online as I or these digital kids do, and he'll reach theoretical retirement age in less than two years.

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