The Human Touch

I got on a school bus at 8:30 this morning and hit the road with thirteen very bright students. The students sat in the back of the bus. They were talking, eating brownies, using their cell phones, and listening to the MP3 players (CD players are so last century).

As I sat up front near the driver, I opened my laptop and graded a few research reports my Technology & Multimedia students had written and submitted to me online through our Moodle course management server. I paste a rubric onto their last page and read the papers, highlighting mistakes, and adding comments in text boxes. When I get back to school I will print these out and return the papers to the students when I see them again next week.

After grading a few papers, I am tired of trying to balance my laptop on my knee and pull out my iPod and watch John Hendron's video podcast from the recent VSTE conference. The bus pulls off the interstate and arrives at Piedmont Virginia Community College where, in the auditorium, I tap into the school's wi-fi and start checking my mail, and writing.

As I am writing this I am on a field trip with the Blue Ridge Virtual Governor's School. I was assigned to be the facilitator of the 11th grade Computer Math class. These students meet with their instructors online using Blackboard (yea!) and spend most of their time writing programs in Visual Basic. Today they are meeting face-to face with their "schoolmates" from Nelson, Louisa, and Greene counties to prepare for presenting their group projects in May.

Computers, cell phones, digital cameras, webcams, printers, LCD projectors, PDAs, smart boards, graphing calculators, iPods, e-mail, instant messaging, Skype, websites, wikis, blogs, and does the list ever end? With all the technology available to teachers, I thought back to how some pundits said that computers would replace teachers in education. It hasn't happened and it never will.

Yesterday I was berating one class about the poor quality of their papers. They are eighth graders. Berating is putting it mildly. With today's technology I could do this with a post to my blog or a forum, or one day soon, e-mail each student, but I was standing in front of the room and I had a stack of papers clenched in my hand as I looked my students in the eye and tried my hardest to make them understand the importance of, not just doing a good job on a paper they will forget about in a month, but of doing your best on anything you do in life; that you get out of life what you put into it.

Teachers, good teachers, provide the human touch in education. We are not just content providers. We are not here to teach to the test. We are here because we want to teach the whole student. It's not just our subjects that are important. It is the love of life, this world, learning for the fun of it. I don't want my students to just know how to use technology. I want them to know how to use technology responsibly. Yesterday I could look directly in my students eyes and know whether I was reaching them with my tirade. It sunk in with some of them. The others, well I'll keep chipping away at them. The point is technology doesn't teach, teachers do. We do it by facing our students every day and dealing with the myriad of variables that our students bring into the room with them. We provide the human touch.

ORIGINALLY POSTED ELSEWHERE ON MARCH 22, 2007.