Communicative Modalities and the Health Care Reform Crisis

There is no such thing as dusk in the city.

This blog’s themes are bandied about outside of the virtual realm much like the bravely crewed caravelles of yore on the high seas during a storm.  An interesting analogy, especially since I’ve only recently returned from a four day trip to Cape Cod with my family where we saw a National Geographic inspired museum of the Whyddah – an 18th century pirate vessel shipwrecked right off the coast of Provincetown.  Undoubtedly, any steadfast Bronxian style speech and fervent fanaticism for one of the first franchises to play the national passtime is ill at ease in such close proximity to Boston.  Our discourse communities have different rhythms, idiosyncracies, and even lexicons (had I not visited Boston previously, for example, I might have had absolutely no idea the meaning of the word ‘packy’ because in New York City, we call them ‘bodegas’, and my close friends in the Midwest call them ‘7-11′, ‘corner store’, or ‘Dairy Mart’ depending on whether or not they are part of a chain,) the importance of which cannot be understated.  However, any suffering I might have experienced at the hands of the ever present communications gremlins during the trip were vindicated following our recent victory in a series against the Red Sox to put us squarely in 1st place.  Communication, however, is key, and knowing whether or not your message got across, it was understood, your interlocutor agrees with you (or not), how that can be rectified (or not) and what is the next step are crucial items in the smooth operation of society as we know it.

Modalities are generally lumped into four categories, which personally I believe is entirely erroneous, however, let us examine what has been so far agreed upon:

Speaking: enunciation, pronunciation, effectively projecting your message verbally in a culturally appropriate manner including items such as the nuances of colloquial speech are hallmarks of either the well trained native, or the highly educated non-native speaker of the language.

Listening: the listener is capable of hearing and comprehending the spoken, often regional minutiae of the speaker’s intended message.  The listener is also able to respond in either spoken or written format to a speaker’s message in a culturally appropriate manner.

Reading: the reader is able to read and comprehend a written (or typed, or virtual), including cultural nuances message.  He/she is able to respond in such a way as to indicate comprehension in either a spoken or written format.

Writing: the writer is capable of using language that is culturally appropriate to effectively communicate his/her message.  This includes utilizing a lexicon correctly suited to the situation for which he/she is writing.  The writer avoids repetition and overuse of basic vocabulary.

The careful reader will have noticed that throughout I purposefully emphasized the culturally appropriate component, and this was done for the following reason: what, if anything, is ‘culturally appropriate’ for America? Are we speaking of the Fox News “Red Eye” culture that enjoyed notoriety recently for disparaging the value of a college education (for which, it is my personal belief, he should be removed from the airwaves)?  Or are we speaking instead of the Keith Olberman/Rachel Maddow culture that speaks in a rambling, snipey, angsty, entitled adolescent culture?  Or is this more on the level of Anderson Cooper/Don Lemon?  In our increasingly visually fixated culture, the talking heads so comically caricatured by Max Headroom during the 1980/s have significantly increased their power to influence public opinion.  In contrast, viewers have similarly, it seems, decreased their ability to properly filter information and extract from it the proper meaning.  Let’s return to the modalities: a television news report involves several things – a Max (or Maxine) Headroom, generally some video which flashes at least a subtitled place name, perhaps a few sentences translated, and quite possibly, a paragraph or three of information, especially if the report pretains to, say, health care legislation.  This is where the ACTFL and I have a disagreement, I personally feel that body language should be one entirely different modality, but that’s the subject of another post.  Take into account the several very high profile, very public presentation our president has made in which he clearly states :If you wnat to keep your doctor, go ahead and keep your doctor”, as well as “This is not a government takeover of healthcare”, and the extremely concise “Two thirds of the necessary money to fund this bill is already tied up in the system.  My mission to congress was to make this bill debt neutral”.  I’m paraphrasing and not using direct quotes, but those are essentially the messages.  It then becomes extremely curious that, especially since I can confidently say that the messages above were heard on CNN, and CNN claims a greater viewership than MSNBC and FOX, that there would still be protesters of the bill holding placards in rallies proclaiming “My Doctor! My Choice!” (even more curious, my friends, that those same people would have long ago been on opposing sides of a line holding placards proclaiming ‘My body, my choice!’, but I digress).  Even more curious still are the signs – proudly painted by hand reading “No Government takeover of healthcare!” and “No new taxes for healthcare!”.  As a teacher it becomes incumbent on me (and others like me) to tell the viewing public that, from the perspective of language assessment, you have failed this test, mainly because you have not been paying attention.

Consider: two thirds of the purported $1 trillion price tag is already in the health care system.  With the paper saving alone as a result of electronic medical records ( a technological innovation that has, quite literally, been available for more than a decade) the remaining third is readily available.  That other third is also made up when, as a result of the public option, those people who simply can’t afford health insurance, or want to forcefully exercise that most American of all democratic ideas – choice – and select something other than the overpriced, underserved policy (in their opinion.  To my insurers’ credits, I have always been provided with exceptional service and care.  Possibly because they knew it was me, I’m not sure) provided by their employer, the 46 million uninsured Americans – a public health emergency waiting to happen, and a travesty tantamount to a human rights violation (something else I heard on CNN) would be able to find preventative, timely, continuous care.  That type of care means: flu shots to slow or entirely impede  a flu epidemic, or Tamiflu and its sister medicines should we unfortunately find ourselves in the midst of a swine/bird flu outbreak.  Pre-natal care to help reduce our infant mortality rate.  Diet counseling so that people know that two Egg McMuffins with ham and cheese in the morning equals roughly one half of your caloric intake for the entire day, leading to a significant reduction in the amount of diabetes, heart disease, clogged arteries, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera that we have in our country.  Vaccinations for children so they can attend school and annual physicals so they can become involved in sports and be less likely to engage in dangerous behaviors, glasses so they can read their homework and continue on the path to improving themselves.  Not to mention which, we pay a high rate of taxes in our country, is it not time that we receive some services in return?  All of these items in the list above become emergency room visits that are expenses later passed onto the insured when those without insurance show up to the hospital.  Now, imagine that cost simply went away, and states, municipalities and, dare I say it? – individuals simply had more money in their pockets.  More money to spend stem rolls into, you guessed it, that extra one third being made up somehow somewhere else.

But cultural appropriateness rears its ugly head once more here at the end.  The marketing for the good ole US of A abroad denotes it to be one of brave, strong independent thinking, inventive, amicable souls.  However, this dep seeded political battle regarding health care, if anything, has proven that a significant majority of the population are frightened, superstitious, undiscerning separatists ready to shuffle off any recognizable facade of “appropriateness”, cultural or otherwise, whenever some self agrandizing Max Headroom blinks onto the screen spouting venomous, vindictive, vilifying statements devoid of veracity.  why are Americans so easily persuaded by falsehoods?  And, moreover, why are they so incredibly prepared to be persuaded by such?  I have my own hypotheses, but, that is perhaps best saved for another post.

Commentary on Time’s article: “Can Language Skills Ward Off Alzheimer’s Disease?”

My aging grandfather: veteran of WWII, electrician, former legislator of his town, and previously incomparable story teller.

The full text of the article can be foundhere, but the full commentary by yours truly can be found below.

This particular report is of specific interest to those like myself and others steadily at war with a creeping monster relentlessly availing itself of increasingly larger parts of a loved one’s mental faculties and neither returning them, nor exchanging them, in the end, for something of equal or greater value.  Inasmuch as this is a blog related to teaching, and most specifically language teaching, the TIME article, is both timely (tra-la!) and purposeful, as it relates to two separate growing populations in our country: alzheimers sufferers, and the numbers that would be legion of those entirely bereft of language skills as a result of decades of focus on skills that qualify soundly as other than bilingualism.

During the previous administration, a poignant commentary was published proclaiming the country’s disturbing, and consequently dangerous dearth of dedicated decoders of delicate documents related to national security.  A wide reaching call was put out to recruit, retain, and retrain as many language specialists as possible in the interest of creating a core of trustworthy translators whose job it would be to relay sensitive intelligence to the proper authorities relating to the ‘war on terror’.  This call, however, was poorly heeded, and the reality of the situation is that intelligence specialists actually enticed D.C. cab drivers known to speak Kurdish, or Urdu, or Farsi to come and work in the community doing translation.  Despite these glaring discrepancies between our need and our available resources, our national security versus our linguistic capability, few people managed to comprehend the scope of the problem.  It is also crucial at this moment to highlight the simple fact that, of the G20, we are the only one that does not require its students to be bilingual – at the very least – before they graduate from high school.  All of those problems are clearly the result of a belief in the phenomenology produced by what at one point in history was known as the almighty dollar.  But, as my Aikido teacher astutely lectured us, on repeated occasions: “the inherent phallacy of all humankind is that I’m in here, and you’re out there.”  If President Obama is to be believed, as well as the rank and file of current economists, our livelihood, our continued existence on this planet, and to echo the words of many a general, federal agent, and boots on the ground soldier, our all too precious safety inside our country depends on our ability to not only militarily defend ourselves, but to comprehend our neighbors, our enemies, their cultures, and their ideas.  That, ladies and gentlemen, cannot be done without language.

So, how is the politicization of this blog post justified? Easily, my friends, because of the following: education, much like art (and I think as I’ve illustrated in my previous posts), is always political.  Just take a look at what’s happening in Albany with mayoral control of the schools, for starters.  But, that’s not the topic of this post.  The topic of this post is people like my grandfather, his niece who lives with her husband across the street and is now suffering the same problem, his older sister that lives in the same house she’s been in for the past 60 years (or so).  One of the most salient statements that deserves baring out is that individuals that developed language skills early on were less likely to develop symptoms of dementia – i.e. memory loss, disassociative disorders, etc. – despite the fact that they may have developed plaques, jumbled neurons, and hosts of other biological indicators that would lead researchers, physicians and caregivers to expect to find symptoms of dementia in the patient.  Nuns – because the subjects of this long range study were nuns – are frequently known to study not only English, but also Latin in order to comprehend the early versions of holy texts, some may also study Greek, and a variety of Romance languages in order to comprehend commentaries known to have been written by saintly figures throughout the history of the Christian religion.  All of that said, these nuns have been tracked through time for the past 60 years, which would make the initial contact with them somewhere near their 20’s.  Logic then dictates that, since they must’ve already taken their vows by that time, they must have already studied the languages indicated above beforehand.  To be clear, their language learning had most assuredly fallen under the umbrella of ‘early in life’.

The final purpose of this post is this: that foreign language class you’re taking – Spanish, French, German, Italian, Arabic, Swahili, Nahuatl, Pashtu, Urdu, Hindi, Mandarin, Quiche, whatever it is, pay attention! Your entire country is counting on you to come out on the other side with the ability to speak, read, write, and understand spoken and written words in a foreign language.  Likewise, you’ll be able to battle both senility and the economic downturn in one fell swoop of your pen.  So, if you’re interested in a few career paths that require language skills that are all starving for people right now, get in touch, I know in which direction to point you.

Mayoral Control at stake, and with it our future

An unpopular topic at the moment, I realize, though, increasingly, one that is much more crucial an item to pay attention to than the recent Obama fly swatting incident that has surreptitiously dominated the airwaves:

Just in case anyone is not tracking the bipartisan acrobatics currently unfolding in Albany, it’s a highly unusual, precariously choreographed waltz in a very baroque masquerade ball, complete with sceptres sporting dual masks.  One of the most eggregious errors of our time would be to allow the previously touted as revolutionary bill conferring mayoral control of the city schools on Mr. Bloomberg set to expire in the immediate future.  This seems to be less of a hot button issue than obviously I believe it should be.  On the battle front are the educational lives of no less than 1.1 million children, the interests of their parents, the teaching lives of the educators responsible for their instruction, and the administrators whose purpose it is to ensure that the entire affair runs smoothly.

Of greatest concern is the high stakes testing program in which hizzoner has put absolute faith, a failed and utterly unrealistic regime of exams and statistics gathering that is not only easily, but frequently manipulated to tease out only the most favorable of representations for those collecting the data.  This  holdover from the No Child Left Behind legislation was an educational paradox that produced innumerable dissatisfying, disparate, and disheartening results in the state of Texas under Bush Jr.’s governorship long before it ever was enacted as a national policy.  Now seven years old and flagging, the policy is underfunded by many billions of dollars (and, according to whom you believe, that figure is either two or three digits following by nine zeroes), a fact that current US Education Secretary Arne Duncan seeks to do something significant to resolve.  This program’s reflection in  the City of New York is something that has caused those of us in the trenches to have heard far too often from APs and Principals: “…see if you can find any more points for this one”, or, in extreme cases, reclassifying a student entirely so that their participation in an exam is not required (reclassifying meaning, for example, that a student -at exam time- is subsequently labeled ‘Learning Disabled’ or some other particular edu-speak moniker in order to avoid the particular embarassment of having them participate in an exam that they are quite obviously going to fail).

But, the testing phase of the mayoral control protocol is not the sole cause for vitriol.  There is further need for concern regarding the entire small schools initiative and how that unfolds in terms of treatment of teachers, students, and parents.  The entire small schools initiative is something that has created nothing less than ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision, confusion, dissension, nonproliferation, and deunification.  It has forced a paucity of resources for the classroom because the supply departments simply can’t keep up with the needs of dozens of new schools opening up annually, not to mention the fact that in formerly large schools that are now cordoned off to create uniquely branded (much as a large corporation does with their proprietary product) environments, often entirely eschewing already warehoused supplies, n’est entire storehouses of curriculum materials: books, audio cds, transparencies, workbooks, and manipulatives, from the recently deposed status quo that, in my experience, simply get shoved unceremoniously into a dark and rarely visited closet space where there is such a discombobulation of the aforementioned content rich portals of wisdom and culture that it takes a dedicated, unyielding professional sometimes years to tease out the three class sets of Lorca’s La Casa de Bernarda Alba (which I attempt to teach every year to the advanced classes), or an entire collection of the workbook and supplementary system for ¡Dime! (back when that series was still available,) and order them accordingly inside of a classroom library.  Likewise, the overt, exclusionary, and frequently derogatory to other disciplines concentration on the ‘core’ areas of Math, Science, and English has created a public opinion, as well as one inside of the student population, that anything unrelated to these three basic topics is not only unnecessary, but tantamount to a pathetic waste of time.  Nothing at all could be farther from the truth.  In point of fact, Foreign Language classes are the only hour of the day that students can unify the knowledge they are acquiring in all their other classes, and create a mosaic of understanding unlike anything else they’re doing in the 7.5 hours their in class (for more on this, see my post on Technology in the Foreign Language Classroom).  Lastly, a hyper-constrained focus on three of potentially seven or eight class subjects that a student could possibly take in a day results in a student that takes on the appearance of those in the following picture:

Mayoral Control - just say no.

In reality, some of the most egregious deficiencies are in the way Mayoral control causes treatment of teachers to be even less professional than the situation that already presents in the current paradigm.  In creating a ’small schools focus’ their has been a wholesale bloating of the ranks of administrative personnel, frequently by those who are educators with just slightly more than two years of teaching experience.  The smaller faculty sizes have not increased collaboration between educators, but in fact increased territoriality and left teachers much more exposed to the legendary derision that is the hallmark of a freshly minted power figure that lacks the benefit of the worldliness that can only come with age and breadth of practice.  The minting process is likewise one that is indicative of a term that we collectively had hoped went the way of the dodo with the ousting of the previous leadership – pork barrel spending.  Each new administrator’s salary (if the freely available published figures are to be believed,) rings in to the tune of some $90K+ per annum.  At no less than three new administrators per new faculty, that is a significant chunk of a small school’s budget before the teachers even get in the door.  A distinct lack of support personnel (exam schedulers, class schedulers, etc.) many of these responsibilities are shifted onto the newly minted administrative staff, who in turn foist the hot potato onto the laps of one teacher or another in the hopes that they will be capable of being adept in their new comp time position.  Faculties of 25 professionals or less are also incapable of creating departments such as were previously known (which might have included a total of 25 teachers for just one subject!) in turn creating a difficulty if a students needs to be shifted into a different level class in the same subject, between classes to find a teacher who is a better match, or simply to reschedule their day because they need to complete a course for graduation.

I could, quite obviously, go on and on and on all day regarding this situation, but I believe the point has been made.  Mayoral control has to end, and for the time being it is stopped in the State Senate, pending further review.  Those who know, say no.  So should you.

Why do you need technology in a Foreign Language Classroom?

I have been asked this question dozens of times by as many administrators, all of whom have seen no clear connection between computing, SMART board lessons, or video presentations in a foreign language classroom.  To be fair, I have heard of utopic, far flung districts on the fringes of the mapped educational multiverse -in a previous era of my career, I had, in fact, taught in one of these. It was a smallish planetoid, one that formed part of the CUNY star system, but let us not digress. Unfortunately this has not been my recent experience.  Given the current paradigm of necessity for a more global perspective; not just in terms of our on-the-cusp-of-drastically-changing foreign policy, but also in terms of celebrating the widely diversified international society that is our national culture.  With these considerations we arrive at a deeper comprehension of our country’s identity. Our needs in the global marketplace, political arena, and intellectual community, demand foreign language classes and the enduring understandings they impart should quickly rise to the top of the priority list in terms of core curricula.

Why then, the question, you ask?  For years, and granted, I can only speak from the perspective of someone who has been tenured solely in the NYC DOE, foreign language has taken a back seat to the much more popular and avant garde mission of ensuring that all students, regardless of background are achieving at higher levels on standardized tests in Math, Science, English and Social Studies. Having said that, the purpose of this article is not to have a lengthy treatise on score reporting and its potential faults, or the real prioritization of courses. However, at no point in any subject teacher’s tenure should they have to hear, “X subject just wasn’t highest on our priority list…” from their principal as an explanation for why readily available technology was not deployed to their room.

Enduring Understanding #1: Technological Literacy is applicable across the content areas
Math, Science, English, and Social Studies are easy marks for computational endeavors.  With the advent of programs like JMAP, sites like RegentsPrep.org, and the Adobe Flash animated gallery items in the SMART Notebook for science experiments, not to mention word processing software utilizable for essays of all sorts, it would seem highly illogical to not deploy extant technology heavily into the areas aforementioned.  But, allow me to ask you, what of the Foreign Language (FL) Classroom?  The FL Class is quite possibly the only place where cross curricular integration of themes and material is made easy.  History class studying a unit on World War I? Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and the attendant Rockefeller Center controversy are all applicable topics. Is your Science class working on a unit on conservation? The Amazon, its seemingly endless supply of flora and fauna (despite our most earnest efforts at deforestation), and the incredibly interesting people that live there – especially a recently highlighted tribe on the Peru/Brazil border that was proven not to be ‘lost’ or even ‘uncontacted’ but rather, still living in the same environment they had been for centuries but now find themselves under threat from Peru’s logging industry.  Your Math class is working on a unit about proportions?  Calculate the precise measurements required in order for the Maya to have been able to construct an entire network of cities, all geographically oriented, and all of which had as major fixtures in their planning temples that were properly oriented to view important celestial happenings.  Then realize that they didn’t possess the luxury of things like calculators, or even modern tools to hew the rock, or machinery like cranes to haul the several tons of stone up to the top of these structures.  Sounds like a physics problem if I ever heard one.

These are just some of the readily available connections.  Sit down with me to coffee some time and I’ll tell all the really juicy tidbits.  But all joking aside, each and every one of the themes I’ve listed above have extensive web-questable, SMARTboard-able, high interest presentations (I know, I’ve written a few) freely available at the click of a Google search button.  Vocabulary lists for word walls, reproducible activities, and classroom projects abound for the interested Foreign Language teacher who knows where to look.

Enduring Understanding #2: Multimedia and Web content don’t just occur in English
This awareness comes readily at no surprise to those in the education field (or, I expect it does not) though, to see the veritable shock and awe reflected on students’ faces when they realize that not only do newspapers of the caliber of the New York Times exist in places like Argentina, Spain, Mexico or that -for the native speakers- there might be words in Spanish that they don’t even know exist.  Authentic, YouTube-like embedded videos and links that lead to a plethora of high interest related materials, all in the target language offer limitless possibilities in terms of interdisciplinary unit development.  National Geographic, New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, El Repertorio Español and inordinate numbers of others maintain entire servers full of multimedia material in both Spanish and English.  The aforementioned sites notwithstanding, it should also be readily made clear that searching for podcasts, wikis, and creating a group document (if you haven’t yet, check out Google Docs, it’ll be your next best friend whenever you have to come up with a project involving multiple partners) are all made exceedingly easy with the click of the ‘Search’ button in your favorite engine.  Of course, it should come as no surprise to anyone reading this article that all of the above materials can be easily incorporated into your favorite SMART Notebook presentation, or coalesced into an online format for easy e-mailing, posting to e-chalk, or your favorite wiki, which can then be e-mailed to any admin for easy viewing.

Enduring Understanding #3: 21st Century Education for EVERY class is the desired goal.
At the inception of my credentialing process, yea these many long years, we were introduced to, and trained to a moderate level of proficiency in, programs such as Photoshop, the Microsoft Office Suite, Microsoft Front Page (or whatever its equivalent was at the time), effective uses of e-mail, internet searches, and webquests (a relatively new phenomenon at the time).  The purpose, ostensibly, was instilling in us a capacity to not only utilize such tools effectively in the instruction of our classes, but also being able to impart that knowledge (the training of trainers, so to speak) to our students.  It was therefore a significant affront to not personal educational philosophy, but also the entirety of how my entire cadre of educational professionals had been trained to hear the aforementioned question that spawned this very article.  Incredulous that such an opinion could even possibly approximate the whole of administrative thought towards such a fundamentally crucial sector of the Humanities, I sought out other administrations in supposedly more favorable environments only to be confronted by precisely the same disappointingly confrontational attitude.  This year, working in a highly respected, nationally ranked IB school, buried just barely beneath the surface of a district purportedly plainly patting itself on the back for having instituted a wide reaching, fully funded, and nearly universally deployed technology initiative, the very same question is being asked of not only myself, but every other language teacher on my faculty.  At the same time, science and math teachers on my educational team have complained to me about having SMART boards in their rooms because they see the technology as too ungainly, unwieldy, and beyond their capacity to realistically put into practice.  These same teachers, it should be made clear, have been in the education game a similar amount of time as have I.  This phenomenal discombobulation of priorities is only possible in the current schema of administrative thought where all thematic subject areas are created equal, but some are more equal than others.  Despite pre-adolescent, and adolescent situational awareness being just slightly less than optimal, they can still see a major discrepancy between those subject areas where the figure at the top of the pyramidal power structure has deemed it necessary to flood the environment with toys, and those it has not with an altogether stunning facility. Such glaring disparities in the as yet untainted faces of individuals in their formative years creates a paradigm of thought, effectively lessening their respect for, and appreciation of, the Foreign Language Classroom.

Enduring Understading #4: Technology should never be used as a weapon of last resort or an Improvised Educational Device, but rather a daily tool to complement a teacher’s already well developed base of content area knowledge.
Our students are all children of the digital age.  At one point in history, a rather popular e-mail made the rounds (back in the days before blogs.  Somebody get my cane,) declaring the stark contrasts in the generation gap between those of us just beginning our teaching careers (at the time, 10 years ago,) things like –

1. The words ‘SUV’ and ‘fuelish’ have always been a part of their vocabulary.
2. They’ve grown up conscious of no other president besides Bill Clinton.
3. Elvis has never been IN the building, much less left.
4. TVs have always had a remote.
5. There has always been an internet.

…and so forth

In the same vein, now 10 years (-shudder-) later, an entirely new list should be getting formulated, and indeed, I must attempt to leave my indelible mark here:

1. ROFL, LMAO, OMG, BRB, TTYL, GGRNTS, and Kk are not garble that represents results from a failed attempt at word processing.  They are instead entire phrasal expressions used daily by our youth, and you should be familiar with them. Definitions for the above, and myriad other phrasal combinations you’ve never heard of can be found at Urban Dictionary.
2. A ‘sidekick’ is no longer what the Sundance Kid was to Butch Cassidy, nor what Robin was to Batman.  Its current iteration is a communication nerve center whose proper operation (or something closely akin to it) is now very nearly a requirement for any pre-, post-, or those attempting to recapture, retain, or represent their adolescence.
3. Podcast does not entail the aliens from ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ going on a fishing trip.  They can actually be used as a highly effective teaching tool, utilizable for recording videos of lectures that students can then download and view in absentia.
4. ‘You’re on my space!!!’ (normally squealed in a high pitched voice, regardless of the gender of the squealer) does not represent an incorrect lexical choice in terms of the preposition.  Likewise, asking someone if they have ‘aim’ doesn’t necessarily entail that you are questioning them as to their marksmanship (although, in the odd case, it still does.  Archery teams, for example – I hear – do still exist in some high schools.)
5. ‘Google’, is now used to refer to something entirely different than for which its homonym root, normally seen attached to the suffix ‘-plex’ was originally intended.  In the same vein, ‘Google’, ‘Friend’, and ‘Text’ are all now verbs as well as nouns.
6. ‘Music’, as such, has always existed digitally.  There are no such things as ‘records’ unless you’re in a school’s main office.
7. They can’t play the game ‘6 degrees from Kevin Bacon’ because Kevin Bacon hasn’t been in that many things they might recognize.
8. The operations ‘Cut’ and ‘Paste’ have never involved any tools that you can hold in your hand.
9. They can’t tell you what the letters ‘GPS’ stand for, but they sure as heck know how to operate one better than you.
10. Many of them don’t know how to tell time using an analog (nor what the word analog means!) watch.

Every last one of these items has purposefully been selected to be inherently related to the digital realm.  The stunning pace of technological advancement – processor speeds are only the tip of the iceberg – not to mention knowledge creation, and the glaring responsibility incumbent on each and every adult in their lives to be up to date on new and sometimes improved terminology for each of the processes, items, and communication methods is immense.  That said, it would be tantamount to irresponsible behavior to allow even one of the child’s classrooms, no matter what the administration’s view of the priority of a specific subject matter, to go without the benefit of access to technology (read: SMART boards, internet capable desktops or laptops, etc.) for their lessons.  Training is available in your town, and if not, get a hold of the good folks at SMARTtech, or don’t hesitate to contact me, I would love to come help you.

The only other conclusionary statement I will include here is that education (much like art, but, that is a topic for another article) is always a political event.  Let us recall then, that at this crucial moment we should present a unified front, an indomitable force for the evolution of the educational experience as a whole.  However, the support has to be much more than top down, it also has to be within faculties and interdepartmental because truly, the only people that really stand to lose when such crucial classroom tools are withheld are our students.