What kind of children are we raising?

My Rosh Yeshiva, Rav Yehuda Amital, once told of a conference he attended in Bar-Ilan University. At that conference (whose exact purpose I do not recall), one of the academics declared that artificial intelligence and robotics had reached a point - and this was at least 15 years ago - where the day was not far away where a robot could be built that could do everything that a mother could do. Short of marvelling at the advances in technology, Rav Amital took a broader view and replied, "Yes, we could construct such a robot that could serve in place of a mother. But what kind of child would it raise?"

This question is consistently on my mind these days as we continue to make computers and technology an increasingly important part of education. It seems that we have reached at least the third level of computer involvement in education. Once upon a time, computers were more or less for typing up papers - glorified typewriters, if you will. The next level was computers as a communication tool (email) and then sliding into a role as a classroom aide (smartboards, etc.). The current level is computers being used as a more collaborative medium, as blogs, wikis, googledocs and so on allow students and students and/or students and teachers to work together on projects, lessons, and an ever-widening variety of educational experiences.

Now education is moving towards the next level - online learning or blended learning. In some ways, this has already arrived. The University of Phoenix is famous for their online courses, and people have been able to order great books or entire university courses on tape for decades. YUTorah.org has made it possible to download thousands of shiurim and to literally follow shiur yomi from many of Yeshiva University's Roshei Yeshiva. However, all of those efforts have been aimed mainly as adults. What is beginning to happen is the introduction of this type of learning at the high school, the middle school, and perhaps even the elementary school level.

Few, if any, people are suggesting that 3rd graders should download their assignments, watch YouTube videos, and play podcasts and somehow assemble an education in that fashion. Rather, most suggestions to this effect speak of gradually introducing more and more computer-based elements into a student's education, thus providing them with the opportunity to expand their horizons, better control the pace of their own education, and come to class ready to discuss that which they have already absorbed. As I will discuss in future posts, there is much to commend this approach to education when done well and in an age-appropriate fashion.

However, I write this post as a necessary caution for myself and all other like-minded educators who willingly embrace the next wave in education, and particularly if technology is involved. To my mind, much good has already been achieved through our adoption of various technologies, and there is much more good still on the way. However, we have to bear in mind Rav Amital's question - what kind of children will we raise if we hand over significant portions of the education process to machines? Our role as educators is not simply to pour information into receptacles known as children. Rather, we are charged with helping our students develop as students, as good citizens, as socially responsible members of society, and as Bnei and Bnot Torah. Computers can accomplish the information aspect - we have to make sure that we hold on to our role and ability to do the rest.

The 20% solution and Summer Vacation

My good friend Tzvi Pittinsky posted this week about how Google comes up with all of the cool tools that they have (many of which most people do not even know about). They apparently demand that their workers use 20% of their time, or roughly one day per week, to work on their own projects. The thinking is that given "free time" at work to dabble and be creative, these workers will try to improve the product in ways that would not be thought of if these workers were simply going about their normal workload.

Tzvi wonders out loud what would happen if we allowed our teachers and students to do the same - if school is a knowledge industry, then imagine the ideas that would flower forth if we allowed these ultimate knowledge workers to be creative for a few hours each day.

It seems to me that, at least as far as teachers are concerned, we already have that 20% time - it's called summer vacation. Mathematically, it works out to about 20% of the calendar year, but that is not my point. For many, many teachers, summer is the time to work on new ideas - new curriculum elements, new uses for technology, new pedagogic techniques, and on and on. The school year is a time when we are so put-upon with papers and grading and preparing for the next few classes that there is simply not enough "free" time for the type of creative thinking that brings about the next great idea or even the next small but significant shift in teaching.

I am speaking from immediate experience. Our students' last day was last Wednesday, and report cards were due at midnight that night. Since Pesach, I had been inundated with not only the work involved for the classes that I teach (included producing and marking three full sets of long finals), but also with all of the various scheduling of events and proctoring for the final two months of the school year, putting together graduation, and myriad other administrative tasks.

Then the clock struck twelve on Wednesday night. Classes were over, report cards were entered, activities were completed. Summer had begun, and with it the chance to begin to think about larger plans and ideas. I had been jotting down one-line reminders for myself for weeks, with the hope that I would get back to many of those ideas once the school year ended. Now that the year was over, I felt the creative juices begin to flow. Vague ideas started becoming concrete sets of notes, and hopefully I will have more to share as the summer progresses.

Sure, not every teacher spends their summer working. And every teacher spends some time taking a vacation (which, in my opinion, is very necessary after working with kids in groups of 20 or more for ten months). But most teachers - more than you know - spend significant time over the summer using that relative freedom from their daily routine to brainstorm and create better and more engaging ways of teaching.

Now if we could just get the kids to use their 20% of the year the same way...

The Last Day of School

Eventually, there has to be a last day of school. No matter when you choose to end school - late June, early June, mid-May, Pesach - there has to be a day that is the last one. For many teachers and administrators, this day is to be dreaded - it is hard to do meaningful learning on such a day, we may have spent the better part of the past week wrapping things up with our students and having class parties, and the final day may only be a half-day anyway. Thus, the challenge presents itself of how to do more than twiddle one's thumbs on the last day of the school year.

I like to think that we have developed a nice approach to the final days of school. Sometime during the final week, most classes get into what I will call "siyum" mode - having the last homework, the last test, learning the last few psukim or vocab words or math problems. In our Middle School, we end finals with several days still to go in the school year and conclude with a final chessed project (this year we cleaned up some local parks), a final advisory program, and student council elections for next year. Teachers had a chance to return finals and offer final messages to their students.

When it came to the absolute last day of the year, we adhered to what I consider to be the three messages to send on the last day of school:
1) We had a great year!
2) Have a great summer!
3) Go (name of school)!

How did we do this? We asked all of our students to come in wearing the school colors (and we even slightly relaxed the dress code for this). We said goodbye to those students who are moving elsewhere and recognized those who had excelled in non-academic areas during the year. We played a Jeopardy-style game that reviewed all sorts of things about the school year - from subject matter to school and current events to teacher trivia. Finally, we watched a student-prepared "highlight video" of the entire year and counted down from 10 to the final bell. Our students left happy, excited for the summer, and proud to go to such a wonderful school.

Authentic and Manufactured Experiences

We took our 8th grade class on their senior trip to Niagara Falls a couple of weeks ago. We ditched Washington in the wake of 9/11 (nothing was open) and we never looked back. Our thinking is that seniors do not want to see museums - they just want to hang with each other. In theory, we could spend three days on the bus and they would be more or less OK with that.

At any rate, on the third day we did the actual Falls - first the Maid of the Mist boat ride, followed by the Cave of the Winds, where you walk right into the "bridal veil" falls and get beyond any previous notion of wetness that you ever imagined. I love these activities - I have done them every year for the past nine years and am already looking forward to doing them again.

What struck me was a sincere and unprompted comment from one of our students. We walked from the Maid to the Cave (about a 10 minute stroll around the corner), and while we were doing so, one young lady remarked to me that her family never takes trips like this. Now, mind you, her family has gone on plenty of vacations to plenty of "vacation hot spots." So I asked her what she meant, and by way of explanation she commented that when her family goes on vacation they spend a lot of time in the hotel, but do not generally do things as undoubtedly real as Niagara Falls.

To my mind, this comment was refreshing and thought-provoking. It was refreshing in that it was good to hear a student self-aware enough to realize that simply going to Florida or the Bahamas or even Israel is not really an experience if all that you do is go there without experiencing the place itself.

But more important, the comment was thought-provoking in that, more and more, it seems that the experiences that we provide for our children are more manufactured than authentic, more defined by accumulating lists of locations visited, restaurants eaten at, and official "chavayot" than by experiencing the wonders of nature or having a moment of quiet reflection and spiritual contemplation. As we drove the 6-7 hours to Niagara Falls, passing through some beautiful upstate New York countryside, most of our students had their eyes securely fastened on some form of a screen. When we went to a Toronto Blue Jays game on one night of our trip, some of our students undoubtedly marked off in their head that they had made it to one more stadium in their vague goal of going to all 30.

However, when we stood on the Maid of the Mist, coming as close to the powerful Canadian Falls as possible, watching the walls of water on either side of us and the massive mist rising in the middle, it was simply impossible to think anything other than "awesome". To my mind, no roller coaster in the world can offer what Niagara Falls can - an unbridled encounter with the enormity and undeniability of God's might and the amazing wonders of nature that He created.

And that was, I believe, what touched something inside the student mentioned above. She had been to plenty of nice places and stayed in plenty of nice hotels and eaten in plenty of wonderful restaurants. But at a certain point, one realizes that none of those things offer more than external, physical comfort. Something inside this student was longing to be impressed, to be touched, to be inspired. Niagara Falls did it for her. As educators, it is our job to open our students' eyes to the experiences that will do the same for them.

Finding the Right Tool

Every year, our school runs two three-day trips. Our seventh grade students have a three-day trip in the fall to a YMCA camp in upstate New York and our 8th grade students take their senior trip in May to Niagara Falls and points north. For the past few years, I have taken upon myself to blog both trips, with the thinking that this will give parents the opportunity to hear about what we are doing and - more importantly - to see pictures of their children having a great time.

With our 8th grade trip coming up, we are making a change. Instead of blogging, we are going to report from our trip via Twitter. There are many reasons for the switch, and I feel that they are instructive for teachers and administrators who are beginning to use Web 2.0 tools such as blogs and Twitter.

1) Blogging takes time and was best done at the end of the night on a laptop. Twitter is tailor-made to be done via smartphone.

2) Regular blogging was best for providing end-of-the-day updates. Twitter will allow us to post updates from wherever we are, and can even serve in place of the phone hotline that we have used in the past to update parents about the trip and when we are arriving home (although I think that we will keep the phone system in place for at least this year - transitions have to be gradual).

3) Our blog was not part of a larger school blog, and therefore did not have a natural following. Our school's Twitter account already has a significant number of followers.

3a) Once parents decide to follow our Twitter feed in order to follow the trip, they are likely to continue following us.

4) We can still post pictures via Twitpic, so parents can still see their kids getting drenched at the Falls.

Web 2.0 tools are fun, they are flashy, and they can be cool and make you be seen as cool. But if you use the wrong tool, its utility can wear off quickly and you may waste a lot of time before you realize that you are broadcasting to no one. My advice is to try out as many of these new tools as possible, but heavily monitor how their are being received. Ask me in two weeks how the Twitter experiment worked out.

Some Nachas

It has become almost cliche in education to say things such as "children are all good at heart" or "teenagers are looking for structure and guidance" or other such statements that make the basic point that most students are looking towards their adult mentors for some direction in life, even if they sometimes exhibit this reverence by ignoring our guidance, destroying the structure that we create for them, and exhibit something other than that innate goodness. Of course, a cynic would reply that these statements are all somewhat self-serving: Exxon-Mobil believes that gas is the best type of fuel, Steve Jobs does not understand why anyone would use evil Microsoft products, and teachers believe that they are absolutely essential in the lives of students.

Well, to warm your hearts, three recent cases with my students that showed that at least some of them truly want to do what is right.

1) We have been creating a ביאור תפילה class in Middle School, which now meets twice a week in 6th and 7th grade (with more to come!). Students learn the meaning of the words, some basic laws of davening, and some of the ideas behind what they say. The class also affords them an opportunity to ask questions about davening that may be on their minds. The other day, a mother came over to me and asked, and I quote, "What have you done with my daughter?" Apparently, her daughter's davening has noticeably improved over recent months, and when she pressed her daughter as to what had happened to bring about this welcome change, the girl, after much prodding, replied "ביאור תפילה"

2) I had a meeting scheduled during a teaching period. I entered my class, taught them for a few minutes, left them with an assignment to proceed on their own, and left the class. This is a small and motivated class that I can trust to not commit random acts of vandalism, but as they are 8th graders and it is now mid-May, I was not sure whether or not I should realistically expect the work to be done. As it turns out, the meeting was delayed, so I headed back to class with about 5 minutes left in the period. As I approached the room, I heard that the class was indeed learning in exactly the way I would have wanted them to. I remained outside the door, unseen by my students, and finally entered just before the bell to applaud and commend them.

3) Most amazing of all to me. A number of students crossed a line with me the other day and I asked them to remain inside during recess the next day (basically a מדה כנגד מדה consequence - they cost me class time, so I asked them to give me back some of their own time). As it turns out, the meeting that was delayed from item #2 was rescheduled to be during recess and I was thus not around to meet these students who I had asked to remain inside. Incredibly, most of them simply took it upon themselves to remain indoors. They understood what they had done, the consequence made sense to them, and thus they felt obliged to clear their own slates. Amazing.

Do such moments happen often in schools? Yes. The trick is to be able to put aside the countless demands on our time and attention, to get past what sometimes harries us, and to realize that, yes indeed, our students do want to do right, do want to impress us, and do want us to provide them with guidance and structure.

The Wonder of Voicethread

I have become a serious fan of a fantastic Web 2.0 application - Voicethread. This site allows you to post an image and then record yourself speaking about it, while at the same time utilizing a "doodle tool" to draw on the image. After you are done, you can share what you have done with others and they can also record comments and make drawings. Each person can then see what everyone else is done, and the drawings start fresh for each person, so that when I watch someone else's recording, I watch in real time what they are saying and drawing.

This application has solved a major problem that I was having, and I suspect plagues many others as well. When teaching texts, the most effective way to ensure that students learn how to read texts is to have them actually read it. However, there is simply not enough time in the day, week, or even school year for a teacher with a class of 20 or even 10 students to have every student read enough times to be effective. Once upon a time this was solved with tape recorders. Students handed in tapes to the teacher, who would listen to them (after lugging them all home) and offer comments or a grade. Then came sound files - solved the shlepping problem, but created the new issue of very large files that did not attach well.

Enter Voicethread. This not only solves the old issues, but it provides a bonus as well. On a weekly basis I now post a piece of Gemara and invite my students to read it to me online. In addition, I ask them to use the doodle tool to punctuate as they are reading. In order to see what they have done, I simply log in to Voicethread and everyone's readings are there waiting for me, along with their punctuation. This has no impact on my email inbox and I can do this from any computer anywhere that has internet. Best of all, I can do this as often as I want (although I would remind teachers that it does take time to listen to everyone, and thus I sometimes give shorter readings - enough to figure out if a student is capable of reading or not). Instead of each student reading for me 3 or 4 times a year, I can now hear everyone 15 to 20 times. And - yes, there's more - this takes no time out of class as it is all done on their own time.

I have shared this with other teachers on my faculty and they are rapidly adopting it - not only for Gemara but for Chumash and Navi as well. Our 6th grade teachers have discovered that it is a good way to figure out which kids come into Middle School with weak reading skills. Other teachers have started toying with uses for it beyond simple reading reviews. The possibilities are endless.

Oh, and best of all, it is dirt cheap. Educational accounts are available to schools at the cost of $1 per student per year. If your school won't buy it for you, splurge on it yourself - it will be worth every penny.