E Is for Education

Education may change

In 1943 when my parents were in high school their teachers augmented lectures and reading with blackboards and chalk. The teachers used chalk to explain mathematical concepts, to focus student attention on main points of science, history, language, and to list assignments and due dates.

The world was engulfed in World War II. Schools were open.

Young men in school then, knew that if the war didn't end before they graduated, they would go. Indeed some, like my Daddy couldn't wait to graduate. As soon as they were 18, they enlisted foregoing their final year of school.

When they went to war, no one knew if they would come home again. Or what home would look like when they did.

Methods of teaching in the classroom have changed.

Blackboards disappeared from classrooms before my time in school. By then they were green. And overhead projectors had come into vogue. In fact, when I was in the 8th Grade, us Baby Boomers were overwhelming the schools and schools were covering the shortage of teachers with educational television. In those early days, that did not mean Sesame Street or Reading Rainbow. It meant actual classroom topics with a teacher on the screen.

My 8th Grade physics class was held in the school cafeteria. TVs (black and white, of course) sat on  wheeled carts, placed to be seen by students seated at long tables. 220 8th Graders, monitored by one teacher, learned the basics of physics in that class. Our teacher, (I can't think of his name right now, but he was a very brave man) carried a "pointer." It was a long, tapered stick. Previously, such sticks were actually used to point at things like equations on green blackboards or locations on large maps.

Now that I think about it, he used the pointer rather like George C. Scott playing General Patton used a quirt in the movie Patton. He (our teacher) walked constantly up and down among the tables, occasionally slapping his pants leg with the pointer or using it to threateningly point at a recalcitrant student. Mr. Whatever-his-name-was must have occasionally wished he were wearing that pearl-handled pistol that Patton wore.

When we graduated from high school, the draft sent the young men off to Vietnam. The World may not have been at war, but we felt as though it were.

Today schools are closed throughout America. Students were sent, not to war, but home. With no forewarning. They went to Spring Break, which was extended a week, then through March, and now until the end of April with the understanding that schools may be closed through the rest of the school year. Students in Denver start online learning today.

This was my daughter's first year to teach as a graduate student at the University of Houston. Last Fall Semester she taught Introduction to Fiction. It went swimmingly. She loved choosing which bits of fiction to teach. She enjoyed her students. She decided teaching is definitely for her.

She is a student in three classes this semester, working toward her Masters so she was especially pleased to be assigned to teach Introduction to Fiction again this semester. A very helpful assignment. She didn't have to develop new lesson plans from scratch and she could use her experiences with the Fall class to adapt and improve the class for Spring. She had confidence.

Then Corona Virus 19. All bets were off.

Now she is being taught and is teaching online. Luckily, she is a digital native as are most of her students. Having used computers practically since birth is not enough though. Neither her teachers nor she has been trained to teach online -- so it's all by guess and by gosh. Having lived in a house all your life does not fit you for building one. None of them can have confidence in what they are doing. Little comfort in this time of Covid-19.

Students have left school, but the world is not at war. If it were, we could choose sides and hate those other people. We could build bombs and make bullets. Then the old men would get together, declare a winner. Name what is left Peace and go back to business as usual until the next war.

This is a World-wide Health Crisis. A pandemic. There is no side to choose. Weapons do not exist to fight it. Our hope is that the best minds of the World, working together, will develop treatments and vaccines to control humanity's susceptibility to Covid-19. Only fools will declare a winner and return to business as usual.

The thing about education is that we can