.6 New Systems

The system of writing text books is flawed considering the fact that the half-life of knowledge depending on the subject is somewhere between six months and five years. So what does that mean? The result is that schools are required to be obsolete. As it is, the curriculum development process requires that schools be obsolete. It takes twenty-five years to get something into the schools, and by then the time has come and gone for that information and we know have new information. We still have textbooks in schools that show the Soviet Union as if it were something that was currently on the face of the earth. The Soviet Union disappeared from the face of the earth five years ago. What should a teacher do about that? I would argue that a whole new curriculum process is needed. This whole new process of dissemination and implementation, the whole thing has to be examined. We have to have a new definition of what should be taught and what should be learned. The old definition of what should be taught and what should be learned was pretty much you teach the textbook and you amplify the textbook, but the textbook is the body of knowledge you are supposed to deal with. Now the new model is very different from that. The new one says that you, as a teacher, have to be much more active in the process of identifying what should be taught and what should be learned. You have a responsibility to go beyond the textbook. Right now, teachers are at risk when they teach something new, because they are never sure if the community, the school board, or administrators will back them up. We must find ways to add or revise or discard curriculum elements with ease. Now we have no ways of adding, revising, or discarding curriculum elements, they are just there. Let's say we are going to have this new curriculum development process, and we may use computers or videotapes or the Internet or a weekly reader. For example if you have a weekly or monthly fifteen or thirty-minute television program in each subject like "What's new in Math," "What's new in Science," etc.  . . .  and that as a result such tapes could be collected and the school would have a library of all these tapes. Then if some teacher wanted to know something about some subject that had come up in the last several years they could go to the library and there would be the material and it would all be nicely supported.
So we could develop different systems. They would be costly: we couldn't do it for free, and we would have to have an agreement that we don't have now for the society would pay for it. But let's say we have this agreement. Right now teachers are still faced with all sorts of interesting little sidebar problems. Here is a theoretical question. What would you do if you had a fifth grade student who brought a laptop computer into your classroom? Would you allow that student to use that computer all the time, part of the time, or would you send that laptop computer home and why? Would you let the student use a spell checker on their spelling test? Where I come down on this is that, at this moment, I would not allow elementary kids to have laptops at school for a variety of reasons. I would allow high school students to have laptops and to use them for all circumstances, even tests, and even if they had onboard things like encyclopedias because all that does is make more obvious the inequity that already exists. It just brings it up-front. As far as I am concerned if we can make the inequities that currently exist in education more obvious then we stand a better chance as a profession of getting the resources to overcome those inequities. Right now, the inequities are all there, but they are very cleverly hidden so that we don't see them and a lot of kids are put at risk by these inequities. In the example of the laptop computer sidebar problems become evident. Ten years ago spell checkers were suspect for college classes and there were many English professors specifically who prohibited students from using spell checkers for English papers. That has long since died but it took awhile for that foolishness to become obvious. It will take awhile before we understand that it is foolish to ban laptop computers from high school and college classrooms. They will be there and they will be used and they will give unreasonable advantages to those who have access to them. I would bolster against that by having as many computers available in the school building. Right now, here at O.D.U., Ithink it is very unfortunate that we don't have double the computer laboratory space that we have, because again the fact that you’re in this class allowed to take your quiz at home on your own home computer if you have a modem is a real advantage, and it is an unfair advantage, but it is part of the real world in which we live. It is hard for me to justify perpetuating an obsolete system simply because we can't bring everybody along simultaneously.
We were talking about laptop computers in English. I am here to tell you that there are math programs in the middle schools that require students to have graphing calculators. It isn't even optional anymore whether you use a calculator or not for certain kinds of applications. As I have mentioned before it is a recommendation by the NCTM that students at all grade levels should be allowed to use calculators if and when they choose for any purposes including tests. So there is a substantial body of evidence that shows that a lot of these things are going to be changing but the issue of obsolescence is not an easy issue because it is not easy to decide when the knowledge has sufficient credibility that should be accepted or when that knowledge should be taught in schools or what should be required and most importantly what should teachers and schools be held accountable for in the larger society. I would argue that we could do a lot better if we just had an overt national curriculum, and developed the mechanisms of agreement so we would all know what we are being held responsible for. That hasn't happened, and my guess is that it will probably be another twenty years before we get there, because the illusion and myth of the local control of schools dies so hard. It is my belief that we would have more local control of schools, more teacher involvement, and more teacher empowerment if teachers knew the curriculum they had to teach, the new the concepts of the Revolutionary War or whatever it is that their students are going to be required to know and that body curriculum was about half or two-thirds of the time available so it would be built in that the teachers would be encouraged to add to that new, interesting and anecdotal materials so that they would feel that they had a role to enrich the curriculum and the classroom life of their students. This would be the way in which they would create a more intensive and joyful learning classroom.

	No Parrot Question
	Mrs. Callahan is a school board member in the city of Portsmouth. New knowledge has been introduced in several fields over the course of the past five years. How can she let the teachers in the city teach the new knowledge when it is not in the textbook and it is not on the state Standards of Learning list of objectives?	Answer Here