The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier by Susan Pinker

Author:Susan Pinker [Pinker, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307359551
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2014-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

PROFESSOR GADGET

Closer to home, when laptop initiatives sprang up in schools, I wasn’t immune to the hoopla. I enrolled my twelve-year-old son in an experimental program that was launched in 2000, the year he started high school. One of many such laptop programs springing up across North America and Europe, its immediate coup was seducing a committed, technologically savvy group of parents flush enough to shell out the $1,000 for a laptop for just one child in the family. Like the One Laptop program, the idea was that each child would have a computer that wouldn’t have to be shared. Its second achievement, if you can call it that, was valuing proficiency in PowerPoint and Excel over low-tech tools such as paper-and-pencil tests and term papers. It soon became clear that I had made a mistake.

My son and his classmates spent their time surfing the web and playing computer games; if the teacher walked by, the students would skillfully toggle to the current classroom screen. Overblown sophomoric PowerPoint presentations became the homework assignment of choice (one of my son’s first presentations featured an animated turd that hovered over his subject’s head, like a thought balloon in a comic strip). He thought the whole thing fun at first. But soon all the class time the teacher was spending trying to lure the students’ attention away from screen distractions became frustrating. After a year he wanted out. The school administration, anxious to prove that the pilot program was working, wouldn’t allow it. So committed were they to their experimental laptop program that they wanted empirical proof that it worked, no matter what. They got it by keeping the highest-performing students in the laptop class, sometimes against their will.

The interesting question is why otherwise exacting parents and school administrators have fallen so hard for classroom technology. In his book When Can You Trust the Experts? psychologist Daniel Willingham uses research in cognitive science to debunk sacred cows in education. Lying on the junk-heap of no-evidence-to-support-them are such longtime favorites as learning-styles theory (some students are visual learners, others are auditory learners, and each must be taught accordingly), the whole-word method of teaching reading (memorizing whole words is better than sounding them out), and left-brain, right-brain education (analysis happens in the left hemisphere, creativity in the right). None of these approaches has much of an empirical leg to stand on, but they continue to draw fervent support because people gravitate toward simple explanations and glom onto anything that confirms them. But not all popular ideas are created equal, Willingham writes:

Many such beliefs, though unfounded, are harmless. Maybe they cost us a little time or money, but we find them fun or interesting, and we don’t take them all that seriously anyway. But unfounded beliefs related to schooling are of greater concern. The costs in time and money can be substantial and worse, faulty beliefs about learning potentially cost kids their education. Scientific tools can be a real help in sorting out which methods and materials really help students learn and which do not.

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