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Computers Not Working In Education
salimfadhley writes "BBC Radio 4's current affairs program 'Analysis' is reporting [realaudio] [txt transcript] on emerging evidence that computers have harmed, rather than helped educational progress. There is still much debate among even the most enthusiastic supporters of schools technology about how computers should best be used.
Despite record investment in computers in the USA and UK, recent studies (not the ones funded by educational software companies) have shown a significant drop in core subjects (Math, English) in schools that place strong emphasis on Information Technology.
Evidence also suggests that whilst information technology has great potential in the classroom, teachers have not yet found better use for computers than as a big library. Very few schools have been able to use the new technology for cultural exchange, or to build practical educational networks with other schools.
Teachers do not know whether computers should be seen as an exciting but peripheral educational 'accessory', or if computers can actually be used to solve the most pressing problems of literacy and numeracy - the sorts of things that get kids through exams." The Economist had a similar article a month or two back, about Israeli schools that had similar results, along with an interesting comparison between how people see computers now, and how people in the early 20th century saw film strips in the classroom.
Which wasnt all that long ago... well grade 3 (1987) up until grade 9 (you do the math, i dont have a calculator handy ;), calculators werent allowed in the classroom. You had to work out maths problems on paper.
If my family was being held hostage by some mad mathematician who demanded that I solve some equation or my family dies, i'd skip right to the funeral arrangments. Thankfully there arent many homicidal mathematicians.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
My kid's school (a 5th/6th grade intermediate school) has a beautiful, fully equipped computer classroom - and a teacher who teaches computing only. ...and that's the problem. The teacher knows *nothing* about computers. Practically all the kids know far more than she does.
Because she knows nothing, she dumps 'edutainment' programs onto the machines and has the kids play them continually while she merely maintains classroom discipline.
She spent three weeks (that's 40 minutes per lesson for 10 lessons) having the kids run some kind of 'typing tutor' program. Since all the kids learned to type in 3rd grade (at least as well as a typing tutor program *can* teach), they were all bored to tears with the repetitive exercises.
Fortunately, my son discovered that this stoopid program doesn't disable cut and paste - so he was able to complete all the exercises insanely quickly. Since the teacher allows them to surf the web once they have finished the assignments, he was able to go off and have fun by himself the entire time.
The crowning glory came at the end of the year when the teachers were handing out class prizes - my son was awarded the prize for best EVER score on the typing tutor by the dump computer science teacher - she proudly announced that he'd scored something like 3,000 words per minute with a 0% error rate. Some of the other teachers looked a bit strangely at her - clearly realising that something had gone amok, but perhaps assuming she'd just mis-spoken the results.
This is just one of many gaffes this teacher made. She had the kids "List 10 parts of the Computer". My kid duly wrote stuff like 'CPU', 'ROM', 'Ethernet Ataptor', 'Motherboard' - and the teacher gave him zero on the "test" saying that the correct answer was 'Mouse', 'Keyboard', 'Television' (!), 'Mouse pad', etc. When my kid complained that his computer at home didn't have a mouse pad she told him that this was nonsense and that ALL computers have mouse pads - this dissuaded him from telling her that the monitor is not, in fact, a TV set.
Similarly, she had the kids write down the 10 good things and 10 bad things about computers. My son complained that he couldn't think of 10 bad things. His teacher gave as an example: "They crash a lot" - well, since we only run Linux at home, my son knows that this isn't necessarily true and that it's not the COMPUTER that crashes - it's the SOFTWARE. Inevitably, when he complained he got in trouble.
I've written several letters to the teacher in question (she doesn't appear to read her email - even though it's provided by the school) - with poor results. I wrote and even visited with the Principal to try to get something done - but of course she just says that qualified staff are hard to get - and the State doesn't require that teachers are trained in the subject they are teaching.
So, can we conclude that teaching with computers is "A Bad Thing" ?
No!
Not unless we've carefully checked that the teachers and curriculum are sensibly chosen. Clearly, if my son's school had spent the money that went
into that computer lab in some other way, they'd have gotten more value for money and the kid's grades would have been better...but that doesn't prove that teaching computers are bad - just that they are ineptly managed.
www.sjbaker.org
Maybe if we started teaching C at the 3rd grade level, we would finally have a pool of C programmers talented enough to avoid buffer overflows. In fact, I think that a child who writes an exploitable security bug in their C application should be subjected to corporal punishment. Nobody should pass the 5th grade unless they can write a solid FTP server.
In the long run, this strategy is the only way to improve the quality of software development in this country. We need to teach children at the earliest possible age to have proper respect for the power of pointer arithmetic.