Reblogging:”My Response to the New York Times’ Google Article: What They Left Out. A Lot!

Morna McDermott blogged last week about the NYTimes article “How Google Took Over the Classroom.”  I’m sharing  her excellent and informative post here because there’s so much more to consider, and Morna makes the stakes very clear.

Image result for education data mining

Dear New York Times,

I know that there’s a greater chance of me winning the lottery than there is in you actually publishing what I have to say in an Op Ed. So let’s pretend for a moment this response is actually IN the New York Times and not my little blog, and that millions of readers. the people who actually need to hear this stuff, will become aware of the facts the author, Ms. Singer,  so carefully avoided in her piece “How Google Took Over the Classroom.”  It read like a blatant “paid for by friend of Google” advertisement, because unlike a serious piece of journalism, this multi-page journey into the fairy tale between schools and the tech industry, carefully left out research from the medical profession (pediatricians) or data on whether or not the technological dominance in classrooms is actually GOOD for students.

As Susan Ohanian put it in a recent tweet, the article should have been called “Public schools pay Google $30 per device to train kids to love Google.”

We know these new tech-school partnerships have been great for the tech industry. The NYT article crows about how Google, not educators, are now dominating the conversation over what should be taught in the class and how. Think about that. Tech moguls are dictating what and how children should learn, not educators, nor child development specialists. And their conclusions conveniently seem to benefit their own corporations. What an amazing coincidence that is.

Yes. It’s the 21st century. Yes, computers and tech dominate the future of labor and industry. Yes, both my children own tablets or i-phones. But using something is different than having the industry dominate our children’s waking hours out of (and now) inside of school which adds up to about 10 hours a day, five days a week, from kindergarten through ….adulthood? Reams of private information and data being siphoned out of children along the way to suite private corporate interests, half of which parents are completely unaware of. The one minor blip of critique the NYT article offers regarding student privacy is miraculously resolved in one line about how Google aligns its contracts with schools with FERPA. Phew. That’s resolved! Except that FERPA was carefully revised to open the floodgates for corporate mining of student data, and with ESSA, now promoting policies that allow third party privately managed companies to become LEA’s, well the protection of FERPA for a child’s rights and privacy as a water balloon would be in a gun fight.

So — to my readers. Let’s please do the job New York Times is unwilling to do. Call them on this bullshit and make sure that parents, teachers, students and concerned citizens have all the facts when deciding about who should “own the future” of our children’s education.

First of all, start reading informed researched pieces like every single post by Alison McDowell at in Wrench the Gears to get an honest appraisal of what the tech industry really has in store for our children.

Second, pass along these points about Google (or any tech) dominating education, to consider as well:

  • Increased risks of obesity-increased seat time
  • Reduction of opportunities to engage with multiple learning styles: kinesthetic, social, verbal, environmental…all reduced to visual screen time.
  • Loss of socialization and development of social cuing.

“You can’t learn nonverbal emotional cues from a screen in the way you can learn it from face-to-face communication,” said Yalda Uhls, a senior researcher with UCLA’s Children’s Digital Media Center, in a news release. “If you’re not practicing face-to-face communication, you could be losing important social skills.” Kids are spending more time than ever in front of screens, and it may be inhibiting their ability to recognize emotions, according to new research out of the University of California, Los Angeles.

  • Damage to eyes, hands/wrists, and neck.

One report states “Children can develop pain in their fingers and wrists, narrowed blood vessels in their eyes (the long-term consequences of which are unknown), and neck and back pain from being slumped over their phones, tablets and computers.”

  • Loss of data privacy = online platforms delivered to third party organizations who track every response and behavior your child makes in their learning process. Every bit tracked and monitored and managed.
  • Increases ADHD-like symptoms.  Some experts believe that “Children who are heavy users of electronics may become adept at multitasking, but they can lose the ability to focus on what is most important, a trait critical to the deep thought and problem solving needed for many jobs and other endeavors later in life.”
  • An adrenaline driven mentality to learning (like addiction). As one psychologist’s research findings prove, “As a practitioner, I observe that many of the children I see suffer from sensory overload, lack of restorative sleep, and a hyper-aroused nervous system, regardless of diagnosis—what I call electronic screen syndrome.These children are impulsive, moody, and can’t pay attention…excessive screen-time appears to impair brain structure and function. Much of the damage occurs in the brain’s frontal lobe, which undergoes massive changes from puberty until the mid-twenties.”
  • The monies spent on new devises is often wasted. What could have gone to building materials, hiring staff, or other supports, millions are wasted (See LAUSD) on devices that wind up creating more problems than solutions. That’s our tax payer dollars going to fund billionaire corporations instead of a new playground or library books.

And ask yourself, why isn’t the New York Times willing to put the interests of children before those of corporations?

 

Check out this resource from Center for Commercial-Free Childhood for a great graphic that explores the issues surrounding data collection in schools. Then download their parents’ guide and share it widely!

http://www.commercialfreechildhood.org/parent-toolkit-student-privacy

 

Teaching as a Form of Contemplative Practice

Maybe you’re like me–the pairing of  the words teaching and contemplation is about as harmonious as fingernails on a piece of slate.  My response to that pairing is rooted in my early experiences with contemplative practice. My great-aunt was a Sister of the Good Shepherd and lived in a cloistered convent. When I questioned my mother about what the word cloister meant, she told me that the sisters could not leave the convent and that all of their visits were conducted from behind a screen.

“What do they do all day?”, I asked my mother.

“Pray,” was her simple response.

To a little girl who loved people, that  isolated life of prayer and seeing visitors from behind a screen made no sense.  Contemplation seemed to be reserved for nuns in a cloister–it had nothing to do with the outside world where I lived. My early experience may have clouded my understanding of the riches waiting in contemplative practice, but half-a-lifetime later, I am finally discovering contemplation’s gifts.

I began meditating in earnest about eight years ago when I was working in a challenging teaching situation. The angry woman I taught with  often used sarcasm with the students. Sometimes she was openly hostile and contemptuous of my ideas. I never knew what I would find when I worked with her, so I often found myself in a state of hyper-vigilance.

A friend suggested that I try meditation to help me calm my mind, especially at night when I began to dread the next day and replay all kinds of awful scenarios from our interactions. At first, the only effect I could see was that I slept well after I meditated. But as time passed, I found myself calmer in the face of my colleague’s tirades. I began to observe her behavior and to notice how I felt inside. I breathed more easily. And I was able to choose my words and actions rather than shutting down or fleeing.

Another gift of mediation was that I began to talk back to my initial judgments. If I saw my administrator, I sent her love instead of negative thoughts. When I had a challenging student in the class, I paused for a moment before I spoke. I was more tuned into my bodily sensations and how my inner state was affecting my actions.

Meditation
The Tree of Contemplative Practices

I began to realize that all of the skills I practiced during mediation were slowly showing up during my work hours. Just as I had learned to observe any  thoughts that arose during my sitting practice, I was now observing thoughts during the day, reigning in my wandering mind. In that brief space between observation and awareness, I found some clarity and calm. Teaching was actually becoming a form of contemplative practice.

Mirabi Bush, a mediation teacher, was recently a guest on Krista Tippett;s radio show, On Being. Bush discusses how she learned mediation in India doing the 1960s, and how she returned to the United States, “… when I came back two years later, I was pregnant and married and had a child then. So I couldn’t — when we first came back, meditation — we still had the model of it[meditation] being monastic. And so having a child and being a meditation teacher was just — no one could imagine that… ” (from On Being, 9-2016).

But Bush goes on to talk about her work in the world now and how she creates mindfulness programs in businesses such as Google, where she teaches a program called “Search Inside Yourself.”  The program blends a cultivation of mindfulness and emotional intelligence to help Google’s engineers bring a deeper awareness to the human dimensions of their work and their own role in the experiences and policies they create for people.

But back to the classroom—back to the place where kids daydream and  teachers count the minutes until the class ends. In that crowded space, mindfulness can be as powerful a tool as a smart board, benefitting both teachers and students.   I leave you with the words of William James, writing in The Principles of Psychology from 1890:

“The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”