the id, the ego, & the single misfiring brain cell

This morning, I stumbled across an interesting writeup about how Powerpoint is essentially destroying our learning environment. I don't know about all that. I've seen it used well and effectively, and hey! Maybe I'm just too lazy to build slides. At the same time, I've been in too many classes over the years where PowerPoint seemed served no higher purpose than to put students' minds into a mild state of passive hypnosis, so I'd contend that there is a lot to be said for using the technology sparingly or not at all. 

In six years of teaching, I think I've used PowerPoint twice. No, make that thrice, the first being when I was delivering my "sample" teaching class to my fellow instructors when I first arrived at the Academy back in '06. I put one poem on the screen and we discussed it in detail. On the other two occasions, I've used presentations that fit my needs that had been created by someone else. 

Let's start with the distinct possibility that I'm PowerPoint incompetent or just too lazy to put my own presentations together. The first is demonstrably false--although I only consider myself a true master of Word and Excel--and the second is...maybe there's something to it, provided we interpret "too lazy" to mean I'm too busy doing research and critical reading on what I'm teaching to bother with building slides.  

There are other reasons, as well. By the time I know what I want my students to take from a text, the ideas are too interwoven to present them on slides. They require explanation, discussion, mind-searching (maybe soul-searching?), and more discussion.

Also, "technology in the classroom," a buzzphrase for many years now, is abhorrent to me. Again, I've seen it used well, but it's undependable at best (and hey, my career is in communications and information systems, people!). I learned this long ago when it was frequently my duty to set up VTCs before I was a teacher. At least half the time, we'd end up having one or more parties get cut off mid-conference and have to call in via telephone to complete the discussion, and I'd think, "We could have done it this way in the first place, been more efficient, and had fewer interruptions." But I was a lieutenant, and who cares what a lieutenant has to say? So there I'd be, jumping up in the middle of the truncated conference to fix the problem. 

In my repeated experience, these things are all too often a matter of the technology running the show, instead of the other way around. If the point is the information, use the technology only if it helps. 

Anyhow. Back to teaching.... there's another reason I don't use PowerPoint: Students don't take notes when you use PowerPoint. They expect you to either email the slides to them or post them on a shared drive for their viewing pleasure. 

Notes are important. When you're in school and trying to make connections, writing shit down is important. 

So here's a trick I worked out quite early in my teaching career: When I'm explaining something to my students, I write stuff on the board. When they see me write it down, it's like magic--they write it down. 

Writing on the board also has the perk of, well, the fun of watching someone create something. Do you ever watch those cool videos where you watch someone--often at high speed--draw pictures? I do this at low speed (and my pictures aren't very good, admittedly), but as I'm explaining, I can draw lines and targets and diagrams as I go, demonstrating the connections between ideas. I cannot do this with the static medium of PowerPoint. 

I know, I know. The software is very powerful. It can do that. But the thing is, classrooms are dynamic (at least, they should be), and what I'm explaining arises from my students' questions. I cannot anticipate what they will ask, nor do I wish to. I'm as eager to learn from them as they are from me. There are times I need to guide their thoughts and do, but even then, I don't need or want PowerPoint to do it. I do it. 

If pictures are important enough for my lesson, I'll make photocopies and hand them out. (I did this earlier this semester with a handout that tracked the evolution of English from the Runic/Latin Old English through Modern English.) But most of the time? Literature and composition are about ideas, and PowerPoint is inimical to teaching students to have their own ideas, to trust them, and to allow them to form organically from the text and discussion. 

I brought the "cursive" bit into this because (1) I just saw the viral bitch-session on Facebook and elsewhere wherein a seven-year-old girl is apparently upbraided in writing from her second-grade (?) teacher for writing her name in cursive despite repeated warnings not to, and (2) this is the medium of my incessant board-writing. 

Maybe I'm just old school. I cannot rule that out. But I love cursive and I believe it still has a place in our society and it's still a valuable skill to acquire--if not to write it, to at least know how to read it. 

To couch this discussion in terms I'm more familiar with.... As I teach English, I'm forever caught in the arguments about what is "proper" English and what is "acceptable" and (ahem) "how people talk." I'm aware of all these differences. So you can feel me, let's use the example of a plural pronoun referring to a singular noun. 

We talk like this all the time: "A [genderless] person came up to me and said that they needed to leave the room." To me--being the old lesbian that I am, such obvious avoidance of reference to gender is code for "and she's my girlfriend," but that's neither here nor there. The point is, we use this sort of modern grammar in various circumstances for specific reasons. The problem is, it isn't yet considered proper grammar. Yes, I can see the change on the horizon and I am the first to fight for the fact that English is a living language and thus shouldn't be policed by bluehairs who got off the fashion train in the fifties, BUT. The fact is, it is my job to teach you proper use of the accepted tongue so you have the best chances possible to make it in the business world.

People judge you by you clothing, your accent, your personal hygiene, your taste in music, your children, and how you speak and write the language of business. And right now, it's still important to learn how to use singular pronouns with singular nouns, etc. These aren't my rules; I don't make them up. It's just how it is. 

Back to the "issue" of cursive. I understand that schools frequently don't have the time to teach this skill, and that it is a dying skill not needed so much now as it was 20 or 30 years ago. In another 20 or 30 years, we'll probably have almost no one left who uses cursive. I have no problem with that, either. We and our environments and the world itself evolves. But right now, knowing how to read cursive, at the very least, is still a very useful skill--at least until your 50-year-olds (and up) retire from the workplace. 

There are other arguments for it, of course, such as having the ability to read old census records and archives and do original text research. Most people don't care about this, admittedly (as a historian, I do). One of the reasons I'm a huge proponent of actually writing stuff down (instead of typing it) is that it changes how you learn and how you think to do it that way. For simplicity's sake, think of it this way: if you grew up reading a specific version of the Bible--in my case, it was the KJV--and you go back to that version now, your brain will naturally slip into the old ruts of thoughtless acceptance, passively allowing stuff to sink in or not. But, if you switch to a different version, you will see the old stories and rules and such in an entirely new way. You will think about what you're reading, suddenly. Maybe you've read that verse twenty times in your life and heard it another 2000 (and maybe I'm projecting), but you never thought about it; it has become a mantra. 

Well, when you have to write down what you hear--and cursive is faster than print--you have to process the information differently than if you were sitting at a keyboard taking dictation, itself a useful skill but as any accomplished secretary will tell you, requires little or no thought. 

I understand that teachers don't have time to teach cursive anymore. Um...ok. I'll just push the "I believe" button there, I suppose. But you know what? You don't have to be taught to do it. Hell...most of my students type very well and none that I know of have ever had typing classes (yeah...I do ask them). 

Random story time. When I was starting the second grade, my father was transferred from Nacogdoches to Daingerfield (Texas). I ended up in a very different school world. In the one I'd just left, we printed and were working on our "times tables"; in the new one, my peers were already writing cursive. I taught myself. It took me about a week. (And 9 months later, when Daddy was transferred back to Nac, my peers hadn't started learning cursive yet.) 

Like typing (and learning to use MLA format, for that matter--which I no longer teach, but require nonetheless), these are not skills that must be taught. With few exceptions, kids pick up the skills they need as they need them. 

Because I was writing on the board a lot Tuesday, I asked my students (on a whim) if any of them had trouble reading my writing. In the first class, only one student replied. He said, "I had trouble figuring out your 1's at first...." (I use European/German 1's), but otherwise, no one said anything. I asked the same thing in the second class and one student raised his hand. I asked why and he said he'd never learned cursive. I asked how he was doing with it, and he said he'd learned to read it. 

See? Just like that. What's the big friggin' deal?

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