Ideally, being a teacher makes you smarter, to include with technology (no matter what you teach) -- but there are no guarantees.

There's this extraordinary blogger in England named Marc Scott who teaches computing and technology in schools. My brother, also a teacher (of math), referred me in 2013 to an article he wrote that persuaded me once and for all of a few things:

• Using a computer is like driving a car: the technology of the interface allows you near total ignorance of how things work. 
• I adore driving, and am still afraid to open the hood. Even now, if you want to teach me car part terms beyond "bumper", "steering wheel" and "rearview mirror", I would probably put my fingers in my ears and sing the Star Spangled Banner. I was like this with other things too, for most of my life.
• It reminded me of when I used to see people who could figure things out that I couldn't (like the kid during a school video project who could set up a VCR to record sound correctly even when the cables made it less than obvious). Here's the worst thing about me: I would peevishly make them help me, and tell myself meanwhile that I was better than them for not needing to know such things. Is this what it's like to be very, very wealthy?
• Being a good troubleshooter is the result of all kinds of intellectual successes working together: being patient, thinking logically, the dull-flush of trial and error, refusing to personify the problem, cultivating intuition. 

Of note here is that I used to be the sort of person who liked to get frustrated. Imagine what that is like, to prefer to get upset when it is more strenuous to do so than to relax. To perform one's frustration, via tantrums, even in adulthood, concomitant swearing and all. Imagine too the intellectual stuntedness of someone who has taught himself that growing angry, that throwing remote controls when you hit the wrong button and can't exit the menu without accidentally changing settings, is the normal way to deal with a problem; that the indignity of having to sort something out is far more grievous and pressing than the indignity of being a whining idiot.

From impulsive and in many ways stubbornly anti-learning, to a teacher. That's me.



I am a teacher who has always relied heavily on laptops in classrooms, given that:

• I have worked at newer schools, which always have less money and less infrastructure.
• I have worked at independent schools, which often have less regulation and less infrastructure.
• I was until recently a new teacher and found Googling everything to be indispensable. I still search ceaselessly, both for "how to" or "best way to" (e.g. "best song for teaching genitive") and for materials (e.g. "Genitiv online üben", because of which I'm the only teacher in my department to have heard of Lingolia[?!]).
• I am pro-laptop in classrooms, though I've honed the use of them a great deal, and my beginner language students almost never use them, certainly never to type their writing.
• My schools have always provided or at least allowed laptops. 
• Last but not least: I had coworkers who demonstrated the huge potential utility of using the computer as a machine for learning and not just an interface for clicking.

In 2013 the technology teacher at my school was Martin Gale, one of the finest educators I have ever met and a man who should be designing curricula or serving as a director of learning in schools. I've never worked with anyone else who had that degree of high standards for his students -- unafraid to award low grades for what everyone else thought looked like decent work -- and who had that degree of intellectual engagement with the world around him, the human world and the technological world and the meeting of the two worlds through teaching computers. 

Martin Gale, phenomenal educator

Martin, for his part, respected my knowledge of languages and opened my mind to the thought tree of working to solve problems with machines. Obviously, I respected Martin's knowledge of teaching and told him of the value tree used in languages in which grammar is code-labeling. We worked together a great deal, and had some of my advanced German students write code to animate a game that taught noun cases. It became obvious that technology as a taught subject in school has untold potential to be taught interdisciplinarily, and Martin had an impossible list of projects going on with the primary school, with the art teacher, with music classes, with math (which he also taught), and with my German class. 

The most valuable skill that Martin taught me, however (he's not dead, by the way, I hope it doesn't sound like I'm writing a eulogy), is to trouble-shoot a student's learning the same way you would trouble-shoot a browser extension, a line of code, or problems with connectivity (which in Vietnam were endless). Why isn't Duy learning anything this month even though we're drawing in GIMP and he draws well in art class? Look at Duc's work on this suite project, what do you think? Is she like this in your class? How can I make Do Yeon work harder given that she's bored, talented, but not ambitious, what do you do? The hours I spent dissecting questions of how children think, questions of 'which children were using which skills to do their work in class', and questions of shaping classwork and your role as a teacher accordingly -- these are hours that taught me more about teaching than any formal professional development I've ever received from a school. Most essential is the sense of mystery and joy. There's lots to complain about -- the children, the conditions, the hours -- and complain we did. But it was in the spirit of figuring something out, complaining with an analytical impetus. I miss sorely this kind of complaining, and this kind of teacher.

Sadly, there are schools where the sourest complaining one hears is about the children (or the parents that generate-accommodate such children, or the wanness of administrators in contending with all of this). And these children are most resented when they exhibit the qualities I outlined above in myself: when they are impatient, impulsive, incurious about their own mistakes (uninterested in the matter of their own ignorance), arrogant. 

Dear teachers and schools: why not use technology curricula in a concerted way to counter exactly these saddest traits in modern children?

I understand the view of many, including of many teachers, that consumer technology should be designed for minimal fiddling, designed with the lowest of learning curves, designed to use straight away and to be fixed if absolutely necessary by someone else so that we can get on with our real work. Culturally, I resent people whose interest in technology is an interest in itself -- product nerd types, who are devotees of brands, have a fetish for specs, and conceive of usability as a value per se, as if these websites and programs and apps were more than just vulgar means to value-neutral ends. 

But the saddest thing, for me, about ignorance with computers -- about not really knowing or caring about installing things, downloading things, connecting things, fiddling with things' settings -- is that, if you live in a world where engineers engineer things for you, and you take these things at face value and complain about them when they don't work and buy lots of them and discard lots of them, then where in your life are you practicing the humble magic of learning about complicated things? Maybe with cars, or flowers, or a celebrity's biography, or song lyrics by the thousand. Or maybe nowhere, and if so, that makes you, my friend, a mere (as Franzen would say, "in the most damning sense of the word") consumer. Interface or no, a user. 

And if you are a teacher, whose job it is to teach students complicated things, against their will or their well justified, defensive, discerning apathy, then what right do you have to more than a few such areas of ignorance yourself?