I'm down in Florida for a few days, tending to some family business, and I have to say that I really miss my students and my classroom. Will the sub know how to start up the computers? Will she know how to log the kids onto the network? It's silly to be so nervous, I know. We get good, dedicated subs in our district. (They have to be dedicated. Do you know how much substitutes get paid?) But I still have this feeling that nobody can run my classes in the same way that I would.
Because I don't know which sub I will get, I am always reluctant to leave complex lessons involving particular skills such as changing page orientation in Word or assigning transitions to PowerPoint slides. You'd think these specific skills would be easy to teach as opposed to a lesson on the causes of the Civil War or interpreting a novel. The problem is that every step has to be exactly right and it can be tough to get all twenty-five kids to do a series of steps correctly. Just as you're getting to step four, you discover that somebody is stuck on step two, and as you dash over to help, the kids who got to step four want to know where they go next. Of course kids are pretty good at helping each other, but that isn't enough to get everybody through the sequence. So one of the big challenges in teaching computers is that it requires accuracy. You can't get approximately the right menu or the right toolbar button; you have to get it right. That makes it hard to differentiate and allow for creativity. But I find ways to do that, which I will come back to in another post.

One of my extra duties is to be morning hall monitor. I stand in the hallway outside my office door and greet the children who walk past. Since my office is between the main entrance and the first-grade wing I get mainly the younger students. I smile at them and say "Good morning", and one of the most interesting parts of my day is to watch their reactions. Some of them look right at me and wish me a good morning. Some of them are so busy in their bustling social conversations that they ignore me. Some walk past without noticing. A few visibly cringe, as if my cheerful greeting is too much for them to cope with.
When we talk about the diversity within our classes, depending on the context we usually think either of racial or economic diversity or of diversity in learning ability. But one of the biggest challenges for any teacher is to cope with diverse personalities. Shy children, confident children, noisy or quiet or distracted children. Children who will ask for help and those who won't. A few who will sit and cry at the computer instead of raising their hand to ask for help. The class clown, who usually acts out to cover up difficulties in learning.
We have to cope with all of the children, taking them as they come to us. Whether we're teaching math or history or how to conduct Internet research, the most important thing that we do is to interact with every child. And unless we have some connection to each one, we cannot teach them.

In our district we are lucky enough to have an educational Foundation, a group of volunteers, mostly mothers, who organize fundraising activities to help pay for things that the budget won't cover. Every January they invite the teachers and administrators to apply for grants and later in the spring they tell us which ones are approved. We've gotten some wonderful things from these grants -- stuff we never would have otherwise. A climbing wall in the gym. A kiln in the art room. Books in many classrooms. Much of their money goes to technology. This is no surprise. Technology is expensive, desirable, useful everywhere, and obsolete in five years.
The latest cool toy is the tablet PC. They gave us money for nine of them this year, and I was just showing mine off to one of the Foundation Board members this morning. She was quite impressed as I showed her how portable it is and how empowering it is. I expounded on how useful this is in the classroom, since you can walk around the room and look over the kids' shoulders while they work and make notes on their performance. But the thing that really blew her away was the handwriting recognition, because it is so impressively, amazingly good. I can scribble any fool thing and it gets turned into perfect text. And I really do mean scribble. For a teacher I have messy handwriting. (I'm not good at remembering names either.)
So what are we doing with these tablets? I was helping out in a fifth-grade math class earlier today. The teacher there, my friend Joe, uses the tablet to project the do-now assignment, so that the kids can work on it when they walk into the room. "But you can do that with any computer", I hear you say. Yes, but can you do this? He uses Journal to solve math problems, writing them out on the page and showing how to solve them. And the best part of all is that he hands the tablet to students to solve problems for the class. The look on the face of a child who has been handed a tablet and a pen, to write something for the class to see, is the kind of reward that drew most of us into teaching. It's just a pity that even our Foundation can't afford to put one of these into every classroom.

I had a great lesson today with one of my fifth-grade classes. I wanted them to learn how to do tables in Word, so I decided to use the planets as an easy example. Now suppose that I had started the lesson by saying, “Boys and girls, today you’re going to learn how to make tables in Word.” They would have been asleep before I could show them my sample. But instead I started by asking them if they had heard any hot news about the planets in the last few weeks. A bunch of hands shot up, and they started to tell me about mysterious new planets and something about asteroids and something about a probe that just reached the heliosphere. (That last bit came from Nick – he’s into science.)
So we talked for a few minutes about the Solar System and planets and Pluto, because the right answer was that Pluto is no longer a regular planet, but has been demoted to dwarf-planet status. But of course there is really no right answer. The right answer was their interest and enthusiasm and the fact that they were listening and engaged and raising their hands and even jumping out of their seats. We even managed to carry quite a bit of that energy into making the table in Word.
What’s the moral for teaching about technology? We don’t teach computer skills in isolation. Lessons always have to be about more than buttons and menus and toolbars. They have to be about planets and pandas and football players. We know this as a matter of course for elementary students, but sometimes we forget that it matters just as much for the middle school crowd.

Why does a teacher need a blog? That's easy to answer. Teachers work in isolation from other grownups. Each of us is a monarch in our own domain -- our classroom -- where we spend most of our time away from our colleagues. We see them in the office when we go in to make photocopies; we see them in the lunchroom; we see them coming and going in the morning and the afternoon. But we almost never watch them at work and they don't watch us. If you ask me which of my colleagues has the most creative ideas, I would not know. What a shame!
It's even harder to watch other teachers in my specialty. I teach computers to grades four and five, the sweet spot of middle school. I'm the only teacher in my district who does that. The state of New Jersey is a patchwork of tiny school districts, usually one for each town. We get the benefits of home rule, but we miss the companionship of a team in the district who are all working in the same area. So the best way for me to find other computer teachers for these grades is to use the Internet. Just another way in which it enriches our lives. The ever-present reference source. The up-to-the-minute news source. And now the way to send messages to my far-flung colleagues and to hear back from them. A message in a bottle. That's what this is.