November 3, 2003
|
|
Classes at Packer are undeniably different, but if you can see
past the strangeness, you will see some remarkable things. Drop
by Mr. Rush's senior art-history class some morning. Rush--a
dapper, manic teacher who claims he understands absolutely
nothing about wireless technology--leads his students through a
brisk review before an exam, pulling images of Greek urns off the
Metropolitan Museum of Art's website. He makes extensive use of
what's called a Smart Board, a high-tech blackboard that throws a
giant version of Rush's laptop screen on the wall. It's
touch-sensitive, so he can point and click on the board with his
hand, navigating from urn to urn, zooming in on images when he
wants to highlight a detail. He even uses his index finger to
draw lines, and he sketches freehand directly on the screen when
he needs to illustrate a point. When he's done, Rush can save
what's on the Smart Board and instantly distribute it to every
laptop in the room, so the kids can take it home to study.
The new, wireless Packer works in big ways, and in little ways
too. There's a virtual lost-and-found bulletin board--sweatshirts
are a hot item--and another one where kids can post opinions
about the war in Iraq. Last year the school set up an electronic
link with a laptop school on an Indian reservation in Alaska, and
the kids swapped poems and pictures of themselves. "I've been
sick for the past two days," chirps Annie, a Packer
eighth-grader, "but instead of just doing nothing and waiting to
get the assignments from my friends, I could get 'em all off the
email and catch up without having a ton of homework to do when I
get back to school." And kids are picking up computer skills
along the way: watching the fifth-graders touch-type would make
an executive secretary weep. They're whizzes at video production.
They speak PowerPoint like it's their mother tongue--it's how
they do their oral reports. The kids at Packer have become one
with their computers--and the Net that connects them--in a way
that we, the generation that built those computers, will never
grasp.
As for Rebecca Boucher, she overcame any ambivalence she might
have had. Parents also have access to Packer's system, so she can
keep track of what her kids should be doing for homework without
having to peer obnoxiously over their shoulders. More important,
one of her children, who's now in sixth grade, is severely
dyslexic. It takes him an hour to write a paragraph by hand--but
he's a demon typist. "It was as if he was playing on a level
field for the first time," she says, and her relief is heartfelt.
"For him, having that laptop was like being given wings."
As for the other stuff, the games and the "talking" and the God
knows what else, it doesn't scare her. It's an urban campus, she
points out, in a busy downtown neighborhood. "They don't have a
street corner where all the kids can hang out. Inside the
computer is their street corner." She compares it to listening to
the Grateful Dead when she was growing up in the 1970s, back when
rock 'n' roll was still new and computers were safely confined to
the fallout shelter. After all, she argues, all teenagers of
every era have something that they do in their rooms, something
that their parents just don't get, something that defines them as
a generation. "They can hang out together using their computers
in a way that I don't think that I fully understand," she says.
"But I can appreciate it."
Page 3 of 3 1 | 2 | 3
|