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ACCORDING TO LIZ - The old expression goes: “What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.” In other words, what’s good for one is good for us all. Unless it isn’t.
Teachers have known for many years that every child learns differently. There is no one size fits all in the classroom.
Some students absorbed well when a teacher imparted a lesson, others had to read an explanation to process it. Some were thinkers, others were doers.
There were kids who benefited from going up to the blackboard and replicating what the teacher said in chalk. And there were always a few fidgeters who couldn’t focus in class. Surprisingly some of these, after running around at recess, came back in with a comprehension of the lesson that their previous demeanor belied.
Without the need for Ritalin or other pharmaceutical concoctions.
Those were the ones that needed physical activity to embed that lesson in their bones. And if they were forced to sit still for too long all that learning would have gone in one ear and out the other.
And be lost. That loss would transform over time to falling further and further behind their peers. Where drugs couldn’t help.
While we needed digital learning to get us through the pandemic to augment parents’ abilities and adhere to a set curriculum when it was not safe to congregate in classrooms, fixating on screen learning since has done children a great disservice.
When at home, kids were coached one-on-one by their teachers. Perhaps not enough and, depending on the teacher’s style, some were more effective than others. Many children had access to a parent or older sibling to answer questions.
As the sole focus of attention, peer perception was eerily absent from the equation and the student was genuinely free to learn unencumbered.
Now back in classrooms, there are any number of distractions including pressure to perform under the critical eyes of both the teacher and their classmates.
By bringing what was to be a temporary accommodation foursquare into the classroom, educators have shot down what is the best our school system has to offer – variety and discussion.
And replaced it with a continuation of personal tech.
Of which our children already get too much. And, in many cases, aggravates existing problems.
The worldwide addiction to social media, talking heads that not only entertain but also tell people what to do, how to think, and even how to feel. Validation from apps has become more important than approval from friends, from teachers, and from parents.
What onscreen learning by itself cannot communicate is how to experience and relate with others in the flesh, in the here and now.
It can provide information – that is if you are programmed from birth to assimilate such a style of learning – but it cannot provide the social interactions necessary to relate to others, to debate ideas, and achieve consensus IRL.
From time immemorial, from back before cavemen first gathered around the miracle of fire, education has been a matter of community. The birds and the bees do it.
Without group learning, how can our children develop the non-verbal cues about how to react, how to be human.
With personal tech is the added allure of social media to distract – from the teacher, from learning, from others, from feeling.
We need to remove screens from the classroom unless they are the subject of a lesson, not a teacher-replicant.
We need to remove the opportunities of Big Tech to further infiltrate our schools – for their own profit and for the darker advantages of those who would bend the minds of our young towards specific beliefs.
We need teachers to engage students as individuals into engaging with each other in a group made up of diverse elements as part of a whole that can discuss a panoply of topics with civility and grace, be open to other ideas and willing to change, to synthesize and meld, change paths and grow exponentially, together and apart, as participants in other groups and as individuals.
We need teachers to be a guiding light, instilling a joy of learning and encouraging students to reach out on their own as complete and complex human beings, with technology as a resource – not a shining star, not the be-all-and-end-all.
We need caring mentors and family members to participate in this exploration on the road to where every child can own the right to be the best that they can be.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
