My life could be divided into a half-dozen portions, all related to schooling. First I was too little to go to school, then I had to go, until I finally graduated 12 years later. The next 12 years I attended the school of hard knocks, working various jobs, traveling around the country. At age 31, I enrolled in teacher-training college, ready, at last, to gain stability, get married, raise a family, and start a career which lasted until I retired; this marks my third year from the outside looking in, and I can’t say I miss it.
Driving past Berryville High School last week, I observed students gathered under a gazebo at lunchtime – they looked so young! But of course they were the same ages as kids I had worked with for 26 years.
The first week of school, and the first week back in January, are always exciting. Catching up with old friends, meeting new ones, an anticipation of fun or mischief, and dread of routines built on boredom or time-wasting.
I miss particular people, but three things I cannot miss. First is paperwork. Other public servants – think police and nurses – must spend significant time every day documenting what they do when they are permitted to actually do their work. It is all computer-generated, which theoretically saves time and paper, but does neither. Anyone who uses computers knows what valuable tools they are – until something goes wrong: hardware problems, software crashes, power failures, Internet connection lost, endless distractions. Schools have other problems: emails demand immediate action, or someone accidentally hit the panic button and we go into lockdown mode.
Personal computers emerged about the time I began my teaching career. I remember my wife typing a college paper for me on an old Apple computer with green letters on a black screen, printed on paper with perforations along the edges. Soon after I worked with a teacher who sponsored our school’s “Mac Club;” I took that post when he left. Since then I have attended and given presentations at a few dozen educational technology conferences.
Now almost all of students and school staff carry a mini-computer in their pocket, euphemistically called a phone. Some people tote multiple devices – laptops, tablets, smart phones, and many schools equip students with iPads or Chrome books.
But digital technology is still so new that almost everything about computer use is controversial – at what age should little kids be logged on? Should we abandon teaching handwriting, grammar, spelling, and simple arithmetic since the computer can do all that? Should students have access to phones in class, at lunchtime, or not at all? What about poor kids who don’t have access? How do we handle cyberbullying and digital gossip? When a school is declared a “Google school,” does Google capture private information about children to sell to advertisers, the same way it compromises the privacy of adults? When a district chooses Microsoft, Apple, or Google, does it direct students to become lifelong customers of those companies? What about access to the “dark web” –pornography, hate groups, or that secret band of misfits who worship the Columbine killers and yearn to outdo their mayhem?
That’s the third reason I am glad to be out of school – guns. It is true that schools remain among the safest places in the country, just as airplanes are the safest mode of travel. But if you, or your kid, is in that school, that church, that theater or concert when automatic weapons open fire, safety statistics don’t count. Our country is unwilling to regulate availability of deadly weapons – the Wild Wild West is in our national genes.
When Wyatt Earp ran Dodge City, he confiscated every cowpoke’s guns when they rode in, returned them when they left. Some schools do that with smartphones. But guns are here to stay.
We used to say that the main ingredient in school climate was that the kids felt safe. We have chosen to throw that idea away. Welcome to the new school year at Fortress High School.