My students are excited and scared.

“Mr. T,” Estaphany asks, “does it really cost $25 to get a laptop?”

“Not really. Your laptop is a $1200 model, but the insurance for it is $25 in case you drop it. Sort of like the insurance on your iPhone.”

“But what if I don’t want a laptop?” she asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Mr. T, at my house, there is no such thing as personal property,” she quips, looking down at her shoes. “My sisters and I all share one room and if I don’t hold my phone in my hand, they will pick it up and start Instagramming. If I get a laptop, everyone in the house will want to use it.”

“Estephany, maybe that’s part of the idea,” I reply, trying to calm her emotions. “Maybe the laptop program will help families get digital.”

“But we’re already digital, with our phones,” she answers.

“That’s a point well taken, but the phone is not really a device of production, is it? Mostly it’s for consumption of media and limited output.”

“Huh?”

“You’ll see how powerful life will become with the laptop.”
“Will I?”

TEACHER TRANSFORMATION – FROM PRINT TO DIGITAL

So this summer I bought a Kindle, after polling my Millennial Alumni on Facebook. “How do you all read text?” I posted to my 20-odd students who graduated back in the 00s and were now out in the workforce.

“At work, obviously we read online,” Sarah posted.

“At home, I read on the Kindle,” said Chris.

“Kindle, Kindle, Kindle,” the comment section spoke.

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s rich with text features, like an online dictionary and direct access to Wiki,” Ira posted. “Just highlight a word or phrase and you can instantly get definitions and references.”

Another alumnus chimed in, “And it builds a vocabulary database of words you are learning.”

Now the thread was getting long, “Mr T, you don’t have a Kindle yet?”

“Okay,” I surrendered, “Which one should I buy?”

Well, I won’t bore you with the back and forth, but suffice to say that I just wanted it to read books, not watch YouTube. The Kindle Paperwhite won out and at $100, it was a bargain, thus the adventure began as I started downloading books and reading them digitally.

In two months, my students will get laptops. All of them. In two months, I’ll be expected to teach a digital curriculum on a digital platform in a digital format. Even our lesson plans now have to be posted digitally. Remember when we wrote and typed lesson plans? Remember those days? I remember it well, as I started teaching in 1992, when laptops were stand-alone devices and “networking” was something you did at happy hour.

We’ve come a long way since then, gradually, with fits and starts. The anxiety is building among teachers as we all go through Digital Instruction Trainings. One of my Course Level Team members has opted for early retirement, rather than face the digital tsunami.

“Gerald, I’m retiring in January,” Martin quipped after a Laptop Training.

“Say what?” I gasped. He had only 25 years of teaching, three more than I, and although he was eligible for retirement under the Rule of 80, everyone knows that you need to put in at least 30, preferably 35 years of teaching, to get a decent retirement. He was going to retire on half pay rather than become a digital teacher. Martin silently nodded.

“I talked to TRS last weekend and I can do it,” he spoke solemnly.

“Martin, remember when we first got desktop computers and you were holding the mouse with two hands? Remember that? Now look at you. Your lessons are online, your gradebook is online and you are creating tests with software that lets you track the student data. This is just another step.”

“One small step for man…” he said as his voice trailed off. Martin and I have taught together for two decades and he is one hell of a teacher. I sat there scratching my head. Well, as they say in sports, next player up. We will miss him, the kids will miss him, and I will miss him. Anxiety over the digital tsunami is high.

“Mr. Thurmond, I look like an old man!” Estephanie shouts across the classroom, as she opens a newspaper with both hands.

Estaphanie is reading the print newspaper – for the first time  — in her tenth grade English class, where print is rich, abundant and in many forms. We have ten magazine subscriptions, months of local newspapers, and a class library of adolescent literature novels. There’s just one problem. The kids want to read digitally. On their phones. Over the web.

Each year, my students are become more digitally dependent and paper resistant.

“Scholars, today, you are going to self-select newspaper articles to read and present to the class.”

“But Mr. Thurmond, they’re all so boring,” Justin blurts out.

“What do you mean boring?” I ask.

“I like to click on stuff while I’m reading,” Jada protests.

Ah-ha. The digital reader. Print is too placid, too static, and not tactile enough for her 15-year-old fingers. Don’t they know that research indicates that students have, albeit it slightly, greater comprehension reading print? Don’t they know that their STAAR and SAT tests are on paper, at least for now. Come to think of it, my GRE was digital and I struggled with that interface, but the paper GRE was so much more of a hassle to register for online. (Insert irony  annotation here.)

Here is a generation that has grown up on digital texts and is now shunning print. How do I adapt as a teacher of 20 years? How can I change my ways – and some of theirs – to better engage my students and move them towards the high-stake, high-rigor standards that today’s education climate demands?