Demands on education increase with technology

There’s a lot of national buzz about the condition of our education system in the United States — that it’s failing, underfunded and broken.

I’m sure there are many of these challenges somewhere in our country, perhaps in deep urban economically challenged areas, but not so much in the Mat-Su Borough.

Yes, schools could always use more money; and yes, teachers probably get paid less than other professionals with the same amount of college degrees and workloads, but I’m not going to argue that. I’d like to offer a reflection on how our local education has grown and prospers.

When my wife wrote her master’s thesis, she highlighted a quote from one of her instructors that we teachers are in danger of being asked to cover so much material just to “keep up” with today’s educational standards that we may “teach a mile wide and an inch deep.”

It’s true that teachers today are responsible for teaching greater amounts of content to ensure our students are competitive in the college or job markets. When I was in high school in the early 1980s, I took the “college track” courses. Certainly, I could have taken far fewer classes and even graduated after only one semester of my senior year. Some students can still do that today.

As a high school senior in the 1983-84 school year at Wasilla High, I took a class called Essays and Term Papers to prepare myself for the research and writing demands of college. (As a side note, I’m very thankful for that class.) Now I reflect back to that senior-level, college-track class and compare it with classes offered today in our high schools.

In Essays and Term Papers I learned how to properly format a paper in MLA format. We wrote a few short essays and a single research paper. It was a big deal. It took most of a semester to do that research paper. The editing process was long and laborious, mostly focusing on retyping without all the misspellings and typographical errors. For every new draft, I had to retype the paper on one of those IBM Selectric typewriters (remember those?).

Flash forward to today and I realize I am teaching these same skills to my freshman English classes. My sixth-grade daughter is currently being introduced to MLA format. That is a four-year (plus) jump on educational content from my high school days and students still have three more years to improve, finesse, and master their writing skills. Today, revisions in essays focus more on style than on simple error fixing. In fact, what I spent a lot of time fixing, Microsoft Word does as I type. Now as a teacher I can work with kids’ sentence structure, voice, thesis development and argument. Yes, the chasm of the curriculum is widening, but it is also deepening.

So what’s the difference? Are teachers better today than they were nearly 30 years ago? I don’t think so. What’s improved is technology.

When a classmate of mine asked our eighth-grade English teacher if he could write his essay on his Apple II computer, the teacher was caught off guard. He didn’t know how to answer it. His response was — and I remember this clearly — “I don’t know. It can’t write it for you, can it? Or fix your spelling?” If it could fix his spelling, he wouldn’t be able to use the computer. Of course, we all thought that a computer could actually fix our spelling was ludicrous at the time. (By the way, I just misspelled “ludicrous” and the computer fixed it for me, thank you.)

The tools of technology in the classroom are making a huge difference. They have enabled us to widen the amount of what we teach and deepen the content. Teachers are expected to teach more and more. That’s why we fight for more funding to keep us up to date with the tools we need to teach and keep our kids competitive.

This high-tech world is the world we are to prepare our children for. Many of our students will go into careers and jobs that don’t even exist yet as technology continues to evolve and expand our human potential. We must teach a mile wide and a mile deep. The challenge is great, but it is doable; and the people we send out into this world are the future.

Brian Mead is an English and drama teacher at Colony High School with more than 200 plays under his belt.