As I have mentioned in this space before, my wife and I are
currently raising funds to move our family to Haiti where we will teach at
Cowman School. In the meantime, I am teaching
high school Language Arts to several students there long distance over the
internet.
“Do you understand what plagiarism is?” I recently found
myself asking one of my students as I stared into the webcam perched on top of
my laptop.
“Yes, yes. I know
what plagiarism is,” he answered from his classroom in Haiti.
Then, just as our discussion was about to get more
interesting (and more personal), the image of my student’s face disappeared
from the laptop and our Skype connection was lost for the remainder of the day.
And once again I was reminded of the limits of technology.
Online classes have been growing in popularity in the U.S.
for several years now. They first gained
acceptance at the college level and are now making inroads into secondary
schools (can primary schools be far behind?).
When I taught at Hauser, we used online courses regularly to enable
students with failing grades to recover credits without having to make room in
their schedules to repeat a class.
The more familiar I get with online classes, the more I find
it is a love/hate relationship.
On the one hand, online courses provide amazing
flexibility. If tomorrow morning, one of
my students in Haiti wakes up in the mood for math, he can open his geometry
course. And he can spend fifteen minutes
there or three hours, with no bell to dictate a move to a different subject.
I have to love the flexibility online courses afford
students, parents and schools. Without
online curricula, in fact, there would be no Cowman High School in Haiti: the
student body is much too small to be able to afford a full high school staff.
But that flexibility inherent to online classes is a
double-edged sword. It becomes a test of
self-motivation, discipline and time management for the student. If I am
physically present to distribute a vocabulary quiz, for example, my students
are forced to prove their retention in that next fifteen minutes. If that same
quiz shows up in their Yahoo inbox, though, it can be effectively ignored for
hours, if not days.
On my end, this experience with long distance education has
reminded me that no matter how sophisticated our technology, there really is no
substitute for a flesh and blood teacher’s presence. And it’s not just to crack the whip and keep
students on task. Fostering creativity,
checking comprehension and discussing important ideas do not happen easily or
naturally via satellite.
Technology falls short. That Haitian classroom needs a
teacher on site. And that reality
continually motivates me to keep working to raise the finances necessary to
move my family there.
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