The Failures of Technology and Communication in our Schools

My children have taken part in “tolerance” classes at school; every youth must participate. It is about tolerating differences and looking out for others, standing up against bullying. A website was created at the school, where students can upload art, video and blog entries that bring greater awareness to the issues surrounding bullying, in order to build lines of communication and strengthen the community, so that there will be less bullying. Several schools are supposed to be participating in this website project, and it is hoped that students and the greater community will interact with the postings.

This is supposed to be a win-win. It all sounds so good. Technology in the schools! Kids get to use all sorts of electronic devices and be 21^st Century Journalists of school culture! Students can use unlimited creativity to promote a positive cultural atmosphere at school!

When my son was taking the class last year, it was a simple matter of uploading his information via the computer in the classroom, the host computer for the site. He was also able to upload blog entries from home. There was no login page, but if he typed a forward slash, followed by “login” after the site URL, a login page would appear.

This year, even though he was no longer in the class, my son wanted to continue his participation in the project. I was pleased that he wanted to engage in something beyond a classroom requirement. He loves to write and has a lot of good ideas. He wants to be a good mentor to younger students.

For some reason, however, he was no longer able to access the login page. Every attempt resulted in a “Forbidden” message. My son approached the teacher of the class on numerous occasions to report his inability to login and upload blog entries, he was seeking help.

The teacher, on a few of these occasions said that the website was working just fine; students in his current class were having no problem putting work up on the site.

My son would return home and attempt to access the login page again, only to receive the “Forbidden” message again.

One time, the teacher’s aide suggested that there was a problem having to do with cookies and history. Maybe if we cleared those, my son would be able to login. Clearing cookies and history did nothing to help the situation. My son emailed the teacher through the school access system, detailing the error message and a continuing inability to access a login page. He met with the teacher the next day; told my son that we must be having problems with our computer.

Discouraged, my son came home and spoke to us about it. He had tried to deal with this himself, to no avail. He had been trying to upload blog entries all year, only to be told that it was a problem with our computer.

I told my son,  all of our equipment is working just fine. If there were anything wrong, you would not have been able to email the teacher.

I opened my laptop, opened my web browser, accessed the website and could see the problem right away: there is no login field on the home page. I typed “login” in the search field, and hit the enter/return key. Search results: Sorry, nothing found.

I sent my son to the library and to a neighbor’s house. Would their display of the home page for this site display a login field? No. Surprise, surprise, NOT!

I then looked more closely at the website. A more thorough investigation revealed that there were very few entries for this year, all entered on the same date in April, and again last February.

What is going on? My guess is that the kids in the class must post at least once, to fulfill a class requirement. They make that posting from inside the classroom. Once the requirement had been fulfilled, that was it; the kids didn’t bother with the website again.

Here was my son, who wanted to be involved in an ongoing project, being stonewalled by the teacher and his aide. This must mean: (1) neither the teacher nor the aide built the website, and don’t know enough to “fix” the problem or offer a solution; (2) the teacher doesn’t care if the website is relevant to the school or wider community; (3) the teacher and the school are unaware that the website is inaccessible from outside the confines of the school; (4) if aware, they don’t want to put any effort into doing anything about it.

For whatever reason, the final result is a sham.

And this, my friends, is the problem I see with the forced entry of technology in the classroom. We tax-paying parents are told that if our children are going to be ready for the latest jobs, they cannot learn in the traditional way—those ways are outmoded. We need fancy new equipment and the kids need to interact with technology to do their schoolwork. The results will be better, test scores will go up, graduation rates will be higher, and our kids will be better prepared for the workplace of tomorrow! The politicians and tech titans have their photo ops, and the vendors make a pile of cash. 

This is, to a great degree, both a sham and a shame. It is all about forcing school districts to make monstrous expenditures on equipment that will be outmoded from one year to the next, forcing some teachers into the role of webmasters who are really incapable of handling such a role, forcing most teachers to spend hours above their paper grading to duplicate grading information in awkwardly developed computer systems. There are no time savers, here; expensive systems push overworked teachers into electronic servitude at a great cost to the local communities. And guess what? The results of all this outpouring of money for tech is showing little in the way of measurable upward trends, at least, according to the many articles appearing in the newspapers on this subject.

2 x 2 = 4, whether the sum is written with pencil on a piece of paper or typed up in a computer document. Solving the problem is faster using a pencil and paper, using far less energy, making a smaller carbon footprint, than turning on a computer. Word processing is a fabulous innovation, but writing by hand also stretches the brain in ways that are now being reported.

The teacher of this class, an otherwise affable person, spent the entire year stonewalling my son, telling him he must be doing something wrong, rather than admit he doesn’t know how to solve the problem.  Or, worse yet, he doesn’t care to help my son be involved in building something on-going and relevant. Whatever the situation or intention, the teacher has actively misled my son.

I sat my boy down and told him what I suspected, and asked him to stop trying to make entries on the site. It is almost the end of the school year, now; don’t waste any more of your time on this. I am sorry the teacher couldn’t have been more forthright with you.

He said, I know. I’m disappointed; I really did want to continue to be involved in the project. I think I’ll start my own blog over the summer.

Good for you, I said (thinking to myself, whew! We didn't lose his interest in making a difference for someone else!)

I sent the following message to the teacher, by way of the awkward, expensive, over-burdensome system the school district purchased:

Dear Mr. H-----,



My son enjoyed making blog entries on the W------- Project site last year, while attending your class. He has tried at various times to post things from home this year (which he had done last year), but has been unable to do so because THERE IS NO LOGIN FEATURE on the web page. Adding "/login" to the URL does not bring up a login page, but instead displays a "Forbidden" message. I know he has asked for assistance, and I know he has been told that the problem is with our equipment or our connection. 


I can tell you this is NOT a problem having to do with any of our 5 different computing devices or our internet connection or cookies or history or anything of the kind. We went to the public library and had no luck on the library computers. We went across the street to a neighbor's house and found that they could not access a login page from their computer. There is NO LOGIN FEATURE or PAGE. Perhaps my son did not explain that clearly enough. I hope it is clear to you, now that I have explained it, what the problem is.

If people are required to login to the website to post, then there must be a LOGIN PAGE or LOGIN FIELD. I put "LOGIN" into the site's search field, and nothing came up.

From the home page, I was going to "contact us" using the provided email address, but when I clicked on the link, I received a message that this address could be a phisher, so I decided to contact you through the school access system instead. 



I would be really surprised if postings of any kind can be made to this website anywhere other than the host machine at L----- Middle School. However, if this is possible, my son would really like to know, so that he can add some blog entries. For example, is there a way to post from WordPress? If so, how would my child do that? 

Meanwhile, I think the webmaster for this site needs to work on it, unless it is only meant to be FORBIDDEN. It is certainly forbidding, at the moment.

I am sure the intent is for the site to be accessible and relevant to a wider audience.

Thank you very much for your attention to this matter.

School ends next week, and my kids are moving on to High School next August.

Meanwhile, we hear about Mr. Facebook’s fabulous gift to local schools. I am sure that means the money will be shuffled momentarily into school district office, only to be spent immediately on the latest computers for the classroom. Great for the vendors' bottom lines. Headlines read: Tech Giant Invests In Kids. Smiling faces peer from photographs.

Is it really all about consumerism? It makes me wonder…

The $1.98 Opera Circuit Revisited: 21st Century Communications and Trending

Those of you who have known me for a lllllooooonnnnnnnggggg time may remember the series of articles I wrote in the late 1980s and early 1990s, called “Singing on the $1.98 Opera Circuit.” These articles were all about young opera singers starving for our art, as we built up our resumés. Wacky things seemed to happen in every production (opera company sued by blind bass player, citing discrimination against the visually impaired; three conductors in a row come down with pneumonia before opening night of the show; rehearsal space burns down after volunteers throw linseed rags in a container on the hottest day of the year… stuff like that), and it seemed only right to document these happenings.

I may have those original articles somewhere, but here is a new one. And I mean NEW.

This is a story from a friend of a friend.

This friend of a friend sang for an event, and one of the other singers came up to her afterward. “I love your voice,” this lady enthused, “I would love to talk to you about this classical music group I am trying to put together.” The friend thanked the woman and said she would enjoy speaking to her about it, at some point; she didn’t have a business card handy. The woman said, “oh, that’s okay; I can get your email address from the conductor.”

My friend thought nothing more about it. Weeks passed, busy and full of adventure, heartache or whatever.

Suddenly, from out of the blue, a Doodle poll message appeared in this friend’s email inbox. The poll was requesting that people fill in dates to meet about a new Opera Company. My friend gazed at the many people who had been sent the email in utter bewilderment: reviewers, composers, directors, and singers were among the people whose names and email addresses she could identify. My friend, being rather busy at the time, decided not to respond; she and the woman organizing this new “classical music group” hadn’t actually had a conversation. If my friend had known the venture was an opera company, she would have declined immediately because of the huge amount of travel that would be involved, and the number of other projects she was involved with. She figured that if she did not respond to this unsolicited poll, the non-response would be understood as meaning “I’m not interested.”

Well, reminder messages started coming in. As well as messages from a messaging service that requested the information of the recipient in order to read the incoming message. My friend didn’t really want to be receiving ever more communications from yet another message service, and with the recent hacking incidents occurring across the entire spectrum of retail and other computer network services, she didn’t want to give her information out to one she had never heard of that had “terms of service” small print. So, she was never able to read the additional messages.

Finally, another email, addressed to slightly different huge group of people, arrived in her inbox. This message contained a rebuke to everyone because they had not answered the request for Doodle poll responses.

“‘If you do not fill out the doodle pool, I may have to start calling monthly mandatory meetings,’ was the officious threat.”

“You’re kidding! But,” I said, as we were talking about this over coffee, “you hadn’t agreed to do anything, had you?”

“No!” she said, “I never spoke to the woman prior to getting spammed.”

“Wow.”

“I am not the only one irritated. One of the reviewers who had been among the group emailed replied to everyone, asking how could they get off this list, as requests to be deleted from it had gone unanswered.”

The three of us had our heads together, but fell silent. There was quiet coffee sipping. The whole thing was just too ridiculous.

“So, finally, I did respond to one of the emails, saying I could not commit to anything, at this time. I figured it would all stop, after that.”

“I gather it didn’t?” I asked.

“Well, she wrote me back, telling me she would keep my name, and to let her know when I was available.”

“So, what are you going to do, now?” asked my friend.

“I was hoping you could give me some ideas… See, I just got another email with the ‘company roster’ attached. I am listed as a ‘comprimario.’”

“No way!”

“Yes!”

“But, you never, like, auditioned or signed a contract or anything…”

“Nothing. And now I don’t want to get near this thing with a ten-foot poll. If the gal running it is so pushy with all these unwanted communications, I cannot even imagine actually working with her.”

“I don’t get it…”

“Well, I think she is trying to validate her start-up by including the names of people who have a presence in the music community. I mean, I think I am being used…”

“Sort of a weird compliment. Geez…”

“I don’t think I can get off the list! And I am worried that being on it will come back to haunt me, at some point. I mean, what if this group is bad or a scam or something?”

“Crazy! Most of the time, we are trying to get on a list, somewhere… I don’t know what to tell you. This is really the most bizarre thing I have ever heard of.”

“Maybe I should fill out the Doodle poll, make myself unavailable for all the proposed dates?”

“That might just mean you’d be required to come to mandatory meetings.”

We laughed.

But really, although this is a joke, it isn’t funny.

Meditations in Fast Times: 40. We may come out of the desert

Note to Readers: “Meditations in Fast Times” is a devotional writing experiment for the Season of Lent. Each day during the season, I am writing a poem as a meditation on, taking as my inspiration and intertextual basis, T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, as well as incorporating the daily office, current events, and other readings—some the same as those Eliot used while composing his seminal work and others. This entry completes the series.

                40.

We may come out of the desert
or down from the mountain
thinking the end is the end,
but truly I say unto you:
the end is only the beginning.

From the time we are born,
we learn about sound.
By forming words
and attaching meanings,
by the twin arts
of speaking and singing,
we experiment in order
to discover the ways in which
words can be formulated, just so,
to make bridges
that connect
every last to every next,
binding past to future
by way of now.

We hope to speak properly
—just as we hope every bridge we build
will be firmly welded and bolted—
with phrases begun and completed
properly, meaningfully, even tunefully.

Even so,
despite all best intentions and pronouncements,
the avalanche will fall,
the boat will sink,
the plane will crash,
the land will slide,
and in each case
the dead go before us.

We hope that they help
to prepare a place for us;
truly, that is faith
—and that is how time is both timeless
and redeemed,
for it never ends.

This can never end,
our seeking and our striving;
our experience here is everything,
even when nothing can come of it.

Every path to elsewhere leads nowhere,
leads home;
home is where we start from
and where we return.

While we are about it,
whatever it is,
there is always the chance
that the earth will quake,
that the stone shackle
will be cast aside,
and an Angel will appear,
saying that all shall be well.

The Angel would be right,
of course,
for the Angel’s voice
is the voice of God
telling us that,
in the end,
there is no end.

© 2014 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Meditations in Fast Times: 39. I am torn open

Note to Readers: “Meditations in Fast Times” is a devotional writing experiment for the Season of Lent. Each day during the season, I am writing a poem as a meditation on, taking as my inspiration and intertextual basis, T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, as well as incorporating the daily office, current events, and other readings—some the same as those Eliot used while composing his seminal work and others. This is the penultimate poem of the cycle.

                39.

I am torn open,
The land is shaking;

mend me from my fears,
for all is quaking.

I look around me,
among the rubble of the place,
this is a community, this is home;
the people here have risen together here,
not all of us brilliant, rich or even nice,
but determined here to be,
united in this time and this space,
unwilling to accept defeat, to roam
aimless, beaten, to descend wholly into vice;
disasters help us to see.

The land is torn open,
the whole world is shaking;

save us from our fears,
for all is quaking.

I think of a King,
of three or more touched by Art,
plying their peculiar genius to some service,
uniting despite the challenges of time and division,
of places remembered, re-visioned, restored;
I hear a bell ring,
calling each of us to take some part,
in making or renewing bonds, soothing the nervous,
returning things to rights with care and precision,
finding and cherishing places we thought we’d explored.

We are all torn open,
all the buildings are shaking;

guide us from our fears,
while all is quaking.

We bury the dead,
but we cannot stop while others lie dying,
we must keep calm and carry on the healing,
finding new protocols, building better systems,
because we cannot go back;
it has all been said,
if we say we have not heard it, we are lying,
the life in our care is not for wanton stealing,
yet despite our miserable failures, still glistens,
with vitality even we cannot crack.

Our gates are torn open,
but all has stopped shaking;

Let us dry our tears,
and serve our remaking.

© 2014 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen 

Meditations in Fast Times: 38. We all walk this path

Note to Readers: “Meditations in Fast Times” is a devotional writing experiment for the Season of Lent. Each day during the season, I am writing a poem as a meditation on, taking as my inspiration and intertextual basis, T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, as well as incorporating the daily office, current events, and other readings—some the same as those Eliot used while composing his seminal work and others.

                38.

We all walk this path,
The blood in our veins dances
As we follow the stars;
Each pattern is a math
Of blind schemes and chances,
Of discovery solely ours.

We seek the still,
Where at the still point
There might be peace
Within which to find will
To withstand all disappoint,
To accept a final cease.

Where have we been?
It is difficult to say;
Perhaps we are the place
Where there is no sin,
Only experience may
Mark our path and face.

We watch one we love
Ascend the final tree;
Sacrifice does not mar
The healing of the Dove,
It is here for all to see,
Being reconciled to the Star.

Freedom and release,
Both time and timeless,
Past and future join now,
Where the only timepiece,
Is being, explicitly ceaseless
—Only truth hangs from the bough.

© 2014 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Meditations in Fast Times: 36. If you apply for this job

Note to Readers: “Meditations in Fast Times” is a devotional writing experiment for the Season of Lent. Each day during the season, I am writing a poem as a meditation on, taking as my inspiration and intertextual basis, T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, as well as incorporating the daily office, current events, and other readings—some the same as those Eliot used while composing his seminal work and others.

                37.


                                      If you apply for this job,

Regardless of your qualifications, you are starting from nowhere,
In any moment of any day, in any season, for any reason.
It will always be like this: you will be put off, or if hired, it is a case of

We own you, now. You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, inform curiosity, be truly helpful

Or carry report. For minimum wage, you are here to kneel;
Our control of you has been made completely valid. And work is less

Than a reasoned order of protocol, the conscious occupation
Of the intelligent mind, or the skillfully measured speech.
With you, the dead are speechless; While living,

They could have warned you. Being dead, their frustration is

Sympathetically felt far beyond the language of the living.
Here, the timeless witness of the witless moment

Is everywhere and nowhere, never and always, endless.

© 2014 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Meditations in Fast Times: 35. The Lord GOD set a seal

Note to Readers: “Meditations in Fast Times” is a devotional writing experiment for the Season of Lent. Each day during the season, I am writing a poem as a meditation on, taking as my inspiration and intertextual basis, T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, as well as incorporating the daily office, current events, and other readings—some the same as those Eliot used while composing his seminal work and others.

                35.

The Lord GOD set a seal

Upon this, my trembling heart;

Beneath such healing hands, I feel

Compassion and love—the Healer's art

—Resolving this turmoil and tangle apart.

Healed from confusion back to ease
By the touch of this Master Nurse

Whose constant care is to bring release,

From those bitter dreams that threaten to curse,

And to insure our sickness not grow worse;

We realize the earth is our hospital,

Fostered by the careless billionaire,

Who would prefer it if we take ill and fall,

To succumb to an expensive paternal care

That persist in costing the highest fees anywhere.

Warmth ascends from feet to heart,

The healed soul, moved by gratitude, inspires
Those who seek better ways and art
Than what the billionaire’s business requires,

Adding to the ranks of the healthy by building tuneful choirs.

Wine, mixed with fresh water, to drink,

Organic produce and homemade bread for food,

In spite all we have been told to think,

We are more sound, and more enhanced is our mood
—But we are more aware now, how dis-ease is brewed.

© 2014 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen