Taylor the Teacher

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In its single-minded focus on its quest for excellence in all things fascist, the district I work for has overlooked the most salient feature of modern American life: connectivity.

These millennium generation kids have never known the pre-hive days when we had to wait to make a phone call or hear from someone until we got home. How many American workers go all day without a computer or other connectivity device? Yet we ask them to sit all day long in 19th century classrooms, arranged in rows, of course, with no computer on their desks. They get in trouble for using a cell phone during the day. The district expects the walls of the school to be a nuclear firewall, cutting kids off from their natural habitat — connectedness.

They cannot have a cell phone or any other electronic device turned on inside the school during any part of the school day anywhere. I don’t see laptops on those desks, either. Even if they bring their own laptop, they cannot connect to the school’s WiFi. I myself will not go 8 hours without any kind of connection to the outside world. Most teachers don’t turn their cell phones off during the day, either.

The school network blocks access to YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Urban Dictionary, MTV, and God only knows what else. For a week or so last year, Wikipedia was blocked as well. It does, after all, have an entry for “penis.” But the encyclopedias in the library don’t, right? (Teachers complained to IT about the Wikipedia thing, and they changed it.)

So, in spite of the fact that I have needed access to YouTube several times for excellent educational purposes, I can’t get to it. Meanwhile, students are sneaking around surfing the web completely unsupervised all day long on their iPhones. Plus, they can get around every block IT puts up anyway. It’s only the teachers who can’t (professionalism and all that….)

Case in point: I met with a parent today for an IEP meeting, with all the usual players. The parent stated that she has a fake MySpace account that her son doesn’t know about so she can check up on what he’s doing on MySpace. She said that he logs into MySpace every day during the school day. The assistant principal in the meeting stated confidently that the situation would be rectified. I almost laughed. It’s clear she doesn’t read Lifehacker.

The point is that there is no way to stop this thing, and it’s wrongheaded and foolish to try. We are connected. Nineteenth century schooling isn’t going to work in the 21st century. We will never create the nuclear firewall. How can we just tell them they must cut themselves off all day long? And how productive is that for training people to live in this century?

It occurs to me to wonder if this doesn’t somehow violate the First Amendment’s “right of the people to peaceably assemble.” Aren’t kids assembling on Facebook? I know that’s stretching it a bit since courts have already ruled that school kids have no rights. (It’s no wonder we’re faced with lawsuits. Civil court is the only form of redress people under 18 have in this country.) Do real rights apply to virtual assembly?

One more story, and I’m done for now. I had to confiscate a student’s cell phone today because he was text messaging in class. I walked the phone down to the office after class, and when I got there the same student was in the office asking to use the phone to call his mother for a ride home. The secretary told him that students were only supposed to use the office phone for emergencies, and that “policy” (i.e. the principal) didn’t deem a ride home to be an emergency. But she said she would let him this time. So, “policy” forces me to take his phone, and then “policy” says he can’t use the office phone? Thank God there was a human in there somewhere. Go, school secretary!

Who would want to completely cut off communication from students all day long? Another phrase from the founding fathers comes to mind… “a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.”