November 3, 2003
But as with all great Christmas presents, there was some assembly
required. "That first year--" Devitt shakes her head with
remembered exhaustion. "It seemed so much more difficult than it
does now. All the logistical pieces--getting the students online,
figuring out what all the rules were going to be, seeing how
students were going to use them ... I think for a lot of the
faculty it felt like being a first-year teacher again." Teachers
and students don't make a habit of agreeing on things, but they
agree on this: computers crash a lot. "Most computers that we
have, have glitches," says Shomari, a sixth-grader at Packer.
"They break every five minutes! After a while, you have no care
whatsoever for your laptop. It's so, so, so annoying!"
It didn't help that the middle schoolers had bought a
first-generation product, Apple's all-white iBooks. "I remember
the first year--the issues were ridiculous!" says Chris Rose, who
teaches humanities. "I mean, CD drives were popping out, the
plugs were not working, there were battery problems. It wasn't
software; it was really basic stuff." It also didn't help that
these computers were being used by a bunch of energetic young
adolescents. As Packer math teacher George Turner puts it, "There
is no harder life than in a sixth-grader's backpack." One lesson
the faculty learned fast was that if you're going to base your
lesson plan on the computers, have a backup plan. If you don't,
when one kid's laptop crashes, the whole class grinds to a halt.
But the changes went beyond technological gremlins. The laptops
gave students new ways to learn, but they also gave them new ways
to goof off: playing video games, sending instant messages,
downloading music. "That virtual space is so new," Devitt says,
"it's really easy to forget that some of the same behaviors that
happen in real space can happen there, and that some of the same
rules and expectations for proper conduct apply. A kid might see
going after somebody's password online as an intellectual game,
whereas in real life they would never go into that person's
backpack and try and take their keys."
Some aspects of school life aren't yet ready for the wireless
revolution. How can you give an exam when a student can download
answers straight from the Web? Tests at Packer are still taken
the old-fashioned way, on paper.
Pretty soon the school had to lay down new laws to govern the new
frontier, and frontier justice was harsh. "Last year we allowed
kids to play games during break and lunch," Devitt says, "and
some faculty felt there were kids who were having trouble
controlling their gameplay and weren't getting outside enough or
getting help from teachers. So this year we've decided to set up
a special room that's going to be monitored, where kids are
allowed to go at a certain time." If any middle schooler gets
caught e-mailing, or playing games or doing anything they
shouldn't on their computer during class, it's an immediate
suspension. "In the high school," Devitt adds, "the expectation
is that they can monitor themselves a bit better." Just in case
they don't, last spring Devitt installed software on Packer's
central server that limits each student's bandwidth use and cuts
off access to instant messaging and music-downloading services.
(Some students claim it's still possible to send instant
messages--the students refer to IM-ing as "talking," which should
tell you something in itself--but that rumor has not been
confirmed. Anyway, nobody likes a tattletale.) Faculty also have
the ability to monitor what any student is doing on their laptop
at any time. Students are notified that they're being watched by
an eerie eyeball icon that appears on their screens.
Wireless has done more than give Packer students a new set of
rules to break. The school's entire culture has changed. The
place feels different, and not everybody is comfortable with
that. Everybody you meet at Packer is carrying a laptop. Kids in
the hall wave wireless cards and argue about where to download
drivers. When teachers talk, there's a low, collective clicking
sound in the background--the sound of hundreds of fingers taking
notes via keyboard. "It was painful for me," admits Elissa Krebs,
who heads the English Department at Packer. "Inevitably you would
just have lines of seventh- and eighth-graders up against the
walls with their energy completely focused on their laptops, en
masse. It was just so hard to transition to that image, from
seeing kids socializing and putting stuff in their lockers and
moving from one group to the next." What the Packer population
was learning was that once computers are connected, they aren't
just how we get information; they're how we communicate and
relate to one another too. "It was quiet at the very beginning,
when it was so new," Boucher remembers. "You'd see all these kids
in the hallways with their computers open, and you'd be like,
Wow, is this how it's always going to be?"
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