A Dissent on the Wall of Laptops

In the summer of 2000 I walked into a class for the first time to encounter what I came to think of as the Wall of Laptops. Two dozen doctoral students sat around a large conference table, and all but one or two had their laptops proudly open before them. We started class, and it was clear within a few days (maybe within a few minutes to more sensitive types) that this wasn't working. The core of my teaching, based on the methods of the best teachers I had in graduate school, is presentation and discussion. With the Wall of Laptops, presentation became a PowerPoint flogging, each bullet point another not-memorable nail in the coffin of engaged thinking. And discussion became a sort of lobbing out of the foxhole, then back to email checking or whatever went on back there behind the laptop. I put up with it as long as possible, giving the new technology time to work itself out. Then we derailed class for an hour to sort it out. Fortunately, these were adult students who quickly realized what they were doing to themselves and each other. The wall folded and humanity returned.

The following summer, I was pleased to have Ian Parker's "Absolute Powerpoint" from the New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/05/28/010528fa_fact_parker) to wave when I requested in the first class that laptops generally be left closed. Here are the first few paragraphs of that excellent article:

Before there were presentations, there were conversations, which were a little
like presentations but used fewer bullet points, and no one had to dim the
lights. A woman we can call Sarah Wyndham, a defense-industry consultant living
in Alexandria, Virginia, recently began to feel that her two daughters weren’t
listening when she asked them to clean their bedrooms and do their chores. So,
one morning, she sat down at her computer, opened Microsoft’s PowerPoint
program, and typed:

FAMILY MATTERS An approach for positive change to the Wyndham
family team
On a new page, she wrote:

·Lack of organization leads to confusion and frustration among all family members.

·Disorganization is detrimental to grades and to your social life.

·Disorganization leads to inefficiencies that impact the entire family.

Instead of pleading for domestic harmony, Sarah Wyndham was pitching for it. Soon she had eighteen pages of large type, supplemented by a color photograph of a generic happy family riding bicycles, and, on the final page, a drawing of a key—the key to success.
The briefing was given only once, last fall. The experience was so upsetting to
her children that the threat of a second showing was enough to make one of the
Wyndham girls burst into tears.

PowerPoint, which can be found on two hundred and fifty million computers around the world, is software you impose on other people. It allows you to arrange text and graphics in a series of pages, which you can project, slide by slide, from a laptop computer onto a screen, or print as a booklet (as Sarah Wyndham did). The usual metaphor for everyday software is the tool, but that doesn’t seem to be right here. PowerPoint is more like a suit of clothes, or a car, or plastic surgery. You take it out with you. You are judged by it—you insist on being judged by it. It is by definition a social instrument, turning middle managers into bullet-point dandies.

But PowerPoint also has a private, interior influence. It edits ideas. It is, almost
surreptitiously, a business manual as well as a business suit, with an
opinion—an oddly pedantic, prescriptive opinion—about the way we should think.
It helps you make a case, but it also makes its own case: about how to organize
information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world.

I was reminded of this story today when I read "When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom," by Jeffrey Young in The Chronicle of Higher Education. (http://chronicle.com/article/Teach-Naked-Effort-Strips/47398/) The second paragraph of that article reads:

More than any thing else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from
using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a
crutch rather using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for
discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures
online and find libraries of information on the Web. When students reflect on
their college years later in life, they're going to remember challenging debates
and talks with their professors. Lively interactions are what teaching is all
about, he says, but those give-and-takes are discouraged by preset collections
of slides.

Hear, hear.

And all this reminds me of a conversation from earlier in the summer regarding the high school at which I teach. A dad asked his son, a student who could have attended any high school he wished, more or less, private or public, but chose our small Waldorf high school, why he made the decision he did. His son answered something like this: "At every other school I visited, the teacher stood in the front and lectured the kids, who sat there with textbooks. I don't want that kind of learning. At the Waldorf High School, the students sit around conference tables with the teachers and have real discussions. You can ask real questions and get real answers."

I don't know that other Waldorf schools teach this way, but I'm clear that this is a good way to teach. We live in the information age; access to information, for me or my students, is simply not an issue. Conversation, interpretation, and discussion. Listening, thinking, speaking, and writing. These are the roots of engagement with the world, in a classroom or outside it.

For that matter, when I read Rudolf Steiner on education, I picture a much more collegiate model of education than I find in most schools, Waldorf or otherwise. In the U.S., perhaps largely for economic reasons, we have adopted what I call the "Mother Hen" approach to education (this might also be called the "Martyr" approach), in which teachers spend so much time in class, on the playground, at lunch, and even after school with students and colleagues that their focus narrows and so does their engagement with the world. To perpetuate this nurturing-to-the-point-of-smothering model, especially in high school, simply doesn't serve students, parents, or teachers very well. For a high school teacher to model herself after a college professor (the best college professor, that is)--engaged with students and subject and world, not one at the expense of the other--and to bring that engagement in a mature manner to her students, that's educational.