--when you have the Fabulous Fred of Floyd to kick off the day for you? His content is much beefier (not to mention more reliable!), and his masthead far more attractive.
Today, for instance, Fabulous Fred puts me (OK, us) onto an article called "Powerpoint is Evil!" by one Prof. Tufte of Yale, who, like Bill Maher (see previous post) has it SO RIGHT that I get all excited, and write him the following email. If you want to see for yourself additional proof of how right Prof. Tufte has it, go here, and meet our sixteenth president reduced to his (ostensible) component parts, Microsoft-style.
OK, here's my rant to Prof. Tufte:
Thank you, Professor Tufte. You have it entirely right, and it's all needed saying for well over a decade, now. Perhaps someone will pay attention.
One thing I wish you'd made clear, though: teachers inflict Powerpoint on their students at the rate they do, not because they believe it's an effective teaching tool, but because schools have spent zillions of dollars on "technology," and they are by god going to get their money's worth, so they issue the mandate to "incorporate technology" into every classroom. I have taught English literature and composition at UCBerkeley, Harvard, and an array of high schools, public and private, for the past 20+ years, and technology has been the elephant in the room at nearly every faculty meeting I've attended.
In its earliest stages, and not for long, the mandate was cloaked in frisky terms of adventure: "Let's see how many ways we can use this wonderful new tool!" administrative memos chirped: "Free donuts to the department that comes up with the most innovative pedagogical strategies using Technology!" So we English teachers (some of us, anyway) beavered away for a few months, and came up with . . . not much that couldn't be done on the overhead projectors we'd had since 1964. I beavered only briefly; it was immediately obvious to me that technology in no way enhances an experience that absolutely requires a book, a reader, a pencil, and paper. (And oh yeah, a teacher.)
Hamfisted administrators were not best pleased about the results of our efforts but remained civil until Howard Gardner et al came along with "learning styles." Gardner's work has merit and, like Einstein, he bears no responsibility for what school administrators did with it: they used it to seize what they pretend is several acres of moral high ground. "Different students learn in different ways!" they announced (most of them without ever having taught in an actual classroom, anywhere, let alone in the classrooms they administered), and though no one ever demonstrated exactly what some students of reading and writing might learn better from Powerpoint than from skillful deployment of an overhead projector, "We must not deprive anyone of the opportunity to learn from this wonderful new tool!" Duress is now applied: "Classroom use of technology" is a category on teacher-evaluation forms, of equal rank with "Command of the subject" and "Classroom management skills."
In all my years in the profession, I have never--NEVER--met an English teacher who claimed to be able to teach _Wuthering Heights_ or the correct use of the semicolon better than ever, thanks to Powerpoint (or any other technology). English classes have been reduced to "data-driven meetings" (your excellent term). There has always been data in English class, of course, and some students (OK, many students) have hated that aspect of the experience. Now they not only hate it, they know it's being dressed up as something it isn't (kids are smart; they know, instantly, when they're being hornswoggled) and being allowed to command much more attention than it's worth.
And the elephant trumpets on, unrestrained, defecating all over the place, unattended. Except, perhaps, by someone, somewhere, who reads your article and is a position to remediate the situation, even just locally in some small way.
Thanks again!
/s/
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