Ed
Week has an excellent column here describing our country’s fascination with
technology in education—from typewriters to film strips to computers.
As a
high school English teacher for 37 years, I was entertained by this history of
school technology. Ah yes: the large TV’s on carts we wheeled through
the halls, the film strips we struggle to keep from getting tangled, the white
boards—or smart boards—or whatever they were, the early big clunky computers
that kept crashing (“Save early and often!” we preached), the carts with
laptops, and now the iPads.
The
only technology I ever believed in was a book.
I found that my top students were always, always the avid readers. You can’t shortcut the hours and hours and
hours that avid readers spend hunched over books with all the technology in the
world.
Hear , hear! The book is the best educational technology ever devised, and the most undervalued by contemporary high schools!
ReplyDeleteI should also say that I appreciate that your books, listed over there on the right, are actual books that can be READ, that a reader can immerse himself in. So many education books these days, with their sidebars, their photographs, their sub-headings and their boxed charts and so on, seem meant to be skimmed or read in bite-sized chunks. That's not reading! So thanks, again, for your bookish books.
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