English 5011

Kay Makes Juice out of Apple

To begin this response to our reading for class this week, I have to warn you that I was unable to leave my feelings out of this response. The topics Kay and Apple bring up are issues I have been dealing with all of my life because I grew up in a small, rural town; I have lived in the world of education all my life (my mom having been a high school and community college teacher and is now a community college administrator); and I have always wanted to teach and help others. Working with computers is a recent love of mine: I began working with several word processing and page publishing programs in high school and college. I have also been around strong, intelligent women who are able to help out their school and community by finding funds and grants where others were unsuccessful. Saying all of this, I had a hard time reading and staying focused on Apple’s article. While many of his viewpoints are valid and thoughtful, I think he makes too many excuses for why technology should not be a focus of education.. My experiences in life counteract most of his points as to why technology should not be incorporated into the classroom. Kay, on the other hand, recognizes the problems that come with technology, but he offers the best reason to incorporate computers and technology into the classroom – the students are there to learn, and what better way to learn than to allow the students to retrieve knowledge on their own? Computers and technology allow the students to become independent of the traditional teacher-centered classroom and move onto a more meaningful way of acquiring knowledge – independently.

Apple comes down hard on the concentration of putting technology into classrooms in his article, "The New Technology: Is It Part of the Solution or Part of the Problem." His three questions – "Whose idea of progress? Progress for what? And fundamentally, who benefits?" (161) – are provocative and necessary questions to be addressed, but I do not agree with his answers. He says that corporations and the state have too big of a hand in what the future will hold for citizens and that their idea "progress" will hurt the common man. In my opinion, large corporations do have a little too much of a hold on the common man’s life (Take Microsoft®, for instance; how many businesses and colleges use anything but Windows® or Office®.). By putting technology into the classrooms, though, the common man has the opportunity to get familiar with technology and has the possibility of upward mobility in social class. Corporations and the state do not have some capitalist plot to forcing commoners into buying into certain products. Even though they lead us in that direction, their (especially the state and federal government’s) main goal is progress for the country. The common man aims to benefit if the schools adopt technology since the world is becoming more and more technologically reliant: He has a better base of knowledge from which to work when the schools are able to keep up with world-wide trends in technology. Further commenting upon how computers widen the gap between the "haves" and "have-nots," Apple states that:

. . . the pressure to introduce such technology may increase the already wide social imbalances that now exist. Private schools to which the affluent send their children and publicly funded schools in more affluent areas will have more ready access to the technology itself. Schools in inner city, rural and poor areas will be largely priced out of the market . . . (169)

I come from a rural public school system. Lovington is an example of a town of "have-nots" who have make the best of the situation and try to provide what it can for its community. The population of Lovington is 1,100; our high school with fewer than 100 students in it; my graduating class, 23. As far as technology is concerned, Lovington High School has managed to find ways to provide the students, the majority of which being "have-nots," with pretty up-to-date technology (which I will discuss later), so the students have an excellent knowledge base to go on to college and thrive as future college graduates and more than qualified employees. Further rethinking Apple’s comments, the "haves" in wealthy communities will have opportunities to use computers at school and at home. Denying students computers at school doubly denies the "have-nots" if they have not computers at home. Once again, when schools reflect the trends in ideas and technology, the common man benefits, as does the corporation from which the school is buying those products.

Apple is correct in saying that when technology and integration of computers take over the curriculum, the focus of what we are trying to do with our students can get lost. It is easy for techies and those who are learning new ways of adapting technology into their courses to allow this to happen because it is exciting to come up with new ways to teach students Hamlet when one has taught it for ten to twenty years. Technology does not always interfere with the learning process: it can enhance it. Most teachers know what they are supposed to be teaching the students and accomplish this goal quite effectively.

Apple also slams teachers and administrators whose main goal is to get as many computers for as many students as possible, saying that they are wasting money that could be spent properly elsewhere or that money is being taken away from other programs, such as music or art, which were the first curriculums to get cut in my hometown school. What he does not address is that most computers bought in the high schools are purchased through grants from the state or from corporations. (Often, corporations are willing to donate or discount items for the schools, thus increasing the buying power of the school.) Music and art programs, for example, are usually the programs that are first cut because of lacking funding in the schools budget – not because of the integration of technology. This is not to say that those curricula should be cut. If there is not enough money to go around, then mathematics, science and English are not going to be the programs cut. Grants are available for all curricula; schools should apply for as many grants as possible in order to help fund the school’s lack of up-to-date cameras for photography class. (Give Kodak a call or begin camera drives.) Mrs. Smith (no, this is not a false name to hide her identity), my high school English teacher, has written and received several grants to get computers for her English and journalism classes to use to write papers, research and gather information from the Internet or electronic databases to use for papers and presentations in class and publish the school newspaper. She also received a grant to purchase Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs) so that she and the students can look at articles, poems, paintings, or whatever she can come up with to use for in-class prompts for students to write journal entries or use for class discussion. She is a creative instructor who is able to maximize technology as a tool for learning without digging into the school’s piggy bank for funding.

The above example also negates Apple’s remarks about women not having as much knowledge and understanding about computers as do men. It is true that a large number of men embrace technology and work in computer-based companies, but many women are capable of handling computer-based jobs, too. In the world of education, many women are extremely competent in using computers and can come up with many ways to use them and adapt them to the classroom. Mrs. Smith is not the only example of a woman who works for Lovington High School and who is able to utilize technology in her classroom: Mrs. Casteel, my high school math teacher, teaches geometry, trigonometry, physics, and chemistry with the aid of computers. She also helps seniors take a calculus course through the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, via computer. She is the only teacher, male or female, who teaches by computers and helps her students take college equivalent courses in the central Illinois area. I have also noticed that more men refuse to learn technology that women and for different reasons than do women. Women, who tend to sign up for the majority of college computer courses (to learn how to use the Internet, Office 98, Windows, etc.), tend to ask more questions and embrace the technology offered to them more than men do. Women usually need to take these classes for advancement opportunities in the workplace, but many of them take the courses to be able to help their children do their homework or to help their children learn more by using the computer, countering Jungck’s quote:

Many [of the] women, [because of] child care and household responsibilities . . . or women who are single parents . . . have relatively less out of school time to take additional coursework and prepare new curricula. Therefore, when a new curriculum such as computer literacy is required, women teachers may be more dependent on using the ready-made curriculum materials than most men teachers" (167).

Men tend to have a machismo, "I can learn this on my own" attitude about technology. (Sorry if I have offended the men in the class. I found it offensive that Apple used Jungck’s, a woman’s, quote about female teachers using "ready-made curriculum materials" rather than figuring out ways to incorporate the computer into the classroom.) At the community college I attended, the social science department’s men were the first to have their students "surfing the Net," but the English department’s women were the instructors who had their students composing and using the computers for daily work and fully using the electronic databases available in the library in each of their composition and literature classes. (A few of the English department’s men did not fully utilize the computer labs designed for composition and literature classes, using them only for a portion of their assignments and not navigating around on the computer with the students in class.) All of my statements are based upon my central Illinois experience of living in the community college atmosphere, witnessing women going back into the workforce or getting advanced degrees to further themselves within the company (schooling their employers usually encourage and pay for if the student gets a C or higher in their class) and helping women in my English and technology courses during the past nineteen to twenty-two years of my life (specifically, 1990 through the present). Apple and Jungck do not state where they made their observations, and their research seems to be a bit dated (Jungck’s quote is from her 1985 publication; Apple’s article first appeared in 1991).

Technology has the ability to put the power of knowledge into the hands of the students, which is where it belongs. In his article "Computers, Networks and Education," Kay puts down old theories about teaching and methodologies of education, such as "students are empty vessels that must be given knowledge drop by drop from the full teacher-vessel . . .. view[s] that [miss] the deep joy brought by learning itself" (151). His point in so doing is to make way for a new, yet old (I’m talking Socrates old), method of learning where the student thinks about, researches, explores and discusses an area without the teacher being at the front of the classroom as a gigantic vat of knowledge from which students are to glut their minds with facts and figures. He asserts that computers are necessary tools in the new "enlightenment" of students’ minds. The practitioner (to use technical terms from our class) should use the new technology by integrating it into their lesson plans, which Apple believes to be impractical for practitioners to do. This assertion, not Apple’s, would spread the roles of practitioner, researcher, and scholar around the class so that the teacher and the students would be practicing all three roles. I think it is very possible to accomplish the goal of using technology to help students learn and apply their knowledge about the French Revolution in conjunction with studying Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities on their own – in a less teacher-centered environment. Student-centered and user-friendly is the way to go in the technology classroom.