What are my first thoughts about this issue? Regarding my students, technology and writing? What stands out for me?

Students and technology…. Kids are addicted to it, and naturally take to it. They are more comfortable with it than I am, but I have to keep up with them to teach it. So be it. It is now part of life, and they and we will move along with it. Even Obama can’t get by without his blackberry.


How has technology changed my life?

When I left Good Food Magazine in 1988, I was working as an artist at a state-of-the-art Fortune 500 magazine publisher, second hand to the promotional art director. So in the fall of 1988, is was no big surprising deal that my classroom had no computers—heck, I had to buy my own class set of non-reproducing blue pens and pica rulers for layout. But within the following five years, the school would transfer to the Macintosh LCII desktop computer for pre-press graphic production, and a new phase of my life began, and has since continue to force me to upgrade myself.


What is possible for my students?

My students have the capability to access the Internet in my classroom. They have access to Adobe Creative Suite for graphic design and Microsoft Office for business, academic and professional communications. They have the Internet—the biggest free publishing network in the history of mankind.

What my students lack is often a view to the possibilities open to them, and lack of knowledge of how to access these awesome tools. They often lack a vision for how these tools are a ticket to knowledge, personal power and success. They don’t see how the pieces can fit together to support them on their journey. Often, the view from home doesn’t support them either, or the school community isn’t quite clicking the light on.


Where do I stand on this and why?

I see my job as a teacher, especially a teacher interested in writing, art, communications and technology, and particularly human development, human rights and human potential in a global community, to be a coach for the students in my charge.


What other people does this issue bring to mind?

Linda Darling Hammond, Diane Ravitch and Jonathan Kozol come to mind as educators I respect. Stephen Covey has much to offer here, too. George Lucas, too, seems to “get” the human factor required in education. So do Bill Cosby and his writing companion for “Come On, People.”

But other leaders in education seem to see education as a system that runs as a business to be managed, controlled, to be re-budgeted and the labor re-distributed as if schools were markets and students commodities. Parents, in that view, I guess become the fields that harvest the crops and send them to the marketplace for the consumption of the community. Here I think of Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., Mike Bloomberg and Joel Klein in New York, and the Jack Welsh’s of the business world, as well as the well-meaning but perhaps educationally naïve Bill and Melinda Gates. Of course these are my opinions, and there is more to learn as we all evolve.


Where is my issue evident in my classroom?

I am caught in the bind between the humanist and practical views, not wishing to submit to either extreme, but mostly veering toward the human view of education that has to see teaching as more than preparation for exams. Students have to be part of the classroom process. I say that, not wishing to call myself a student-centered teaching advocate totally as opposed to a teacher-centered view. Education is an effort, an art and a craft. Teachers and students together have to find a way to make it work.