Techno-Shame

When I first began reading education-related blogs, I felt drawn toward "twenty-first century learning" blogs that had a way of blending the New Economy with technology and an idealistic view of education reform.  This was at a time when I taught tech-related professional development while earning a master's in educational technology.

After awhile, though, I found that my experiences never quite matched those of the ed tech elite.  I'd read something like, "I'm having my fifth graders Skype with doctors in an elite medical school.  Next week they'll be performing open heart surgery in underdeveloped nations while controlling a robotic arm via satellite feed."  Then I'd slump my shoulders, hang my head down low and say, "I'm having my kids edit the poetry they wrote for an audience of mostly their own peers."

It's as if, after reading about a Techno Utopia, I would walk into my class every day and reality began to feel more and more like a dystopia.  Do I allow students to move whenever they feel like it?  No?  Then I must be a prison guard harkening back to an industrial economy.  Are my kiddos stopping climate change by collaborating with students in Tanzania?  No?  Then I'm not using my netbooks to their full potential.

It's not that I don't like the 21st century stories.  It's just that they make me feel tired and overwhelmed and sometimes even a little hopeless.  I can't see the context.  I miss all the struggles.  It's tons and tons of fast-paced plot and I'm unable to get a sense of the character development.  It's not that I believe people are lying about what they're doing (or what they think people should be doing).

It's just that on a very deep level I don't feel that I can relate if it's simply a string of perfection.  I still love a good success story (Paula White and William Chamberlain both come to mind), but what I'm struck by in both cases is a tone of humility and an honesty about the struggles.  I can't buy into a story if there are no failures.

Perhaps it's jealousy.  Perhaps.  More likely it's the subtle shame of the message that says, "If you really want change, if you're really going for innovation, then you'll push the boundaries with . . . " and, I don't know, I guess I'm just too low-capacity or too lazy or more likely to attuned to the paradoxes and the conflict and the fact that my kids still need to learn English to launch a project where my students develop genetically altered monkeys that they send to a lunar colony.   If I'm not careful, I start trying to emulate an 21st century ideal that I hardly understand.

Over time, I've dropped most of those blogs from my feed, realizing that the utopian dream is a powerful hallucinogen that will prevent me from seeing the often humble reality of my own classroom.   Today I saw a kid fall in love with a Shakespearean sonnet.  It's the first time ever that it's happened in my class.  Compared with robotic surgery or solar-powered monkey lunar colonies, it's not a big deal.  And that's why I can't read those stories.  I need to be at least a little myopic to understand when big things happen.