Technological Breakthrough

I have a love-hate relationship with technology, heavy on the hate.

My first day on the job, it was all hate. "All the doors have security codes," I was told during my induction. This filled me with trepidation, but when I aired my fears, my husband laughed. The school he works in has security codes on its doors too. "They won't give you any trouble," he assured me. We've been married for decades and he knows me very well, but he obviously lives in hope.

During my whirlwind tour of the school, I was in awe of how many unfamiliar bits of machinery every classroom had. Uneasy awe, that is. "You'll love the visualizer," my husband told me. "You can stick a sheet of paper or a whole book under it, flick a button, and it's projected onto a screen for the whole class to see."

Actually, this sounded great. No more fiddling with Xerox machines, wasting time, paper and energy on handouts! No more endless scribbling on the whiteboard! But best of all, the visualizers stayed in the classroom permanently. In our school in Cyprus, we had to write everything on the white board as photocopying was discouraged. Also, things got stolen, so every piece of equipment that went into the classroom had to be taken out afterwards and locked away; we teachers were loaded down like pack-camels.

Unfortunately, the visualizer turned out to be a crushing disappointment. As soon as I put my carefully prepared handout in the visualizer and turned it on, the image on the screen began to jump and flicker.

My students blinked and frowned and rubbed their eyes. "We are get headache!" one boy complained.

"Leave it a few minutes and it'll settle," a colleague advised me.

I tried this, but it didn't work. The image continued to skitter and jump about, words perfectly focussed one minute, then blurred the next.

My students grimaced and rubbed their heads. "Please turn off!" they begged.

So I gave up. I scribbled some exercises on the board for them to do in my absence, and hurried out to make Xerox copies. The elevator was broken, so I had to take the stairs. When I got to the Xerox room, I punched in the security code, turned the door handle -- and found that it would not open. A few stress-charged minutes later, I'd already had the equivalent of a full day's work-out on the door, which remained unmoved. If a passing colleague hadn't pity on me and unlocked the door, who knows how long I'd have stayed there? But once I'd finally gained entrance, to my endless frustration, I couldn't get the Xerox machine to work. I almost wondered if it had watched me struggling with the door and decided to toy with me.

By the time I located a machine that did work -- after grappling afresh with the security code on the door -- I almost wept with relief. Clutching my copies, I raced back up the stairs.

The rest of the lesson went well enough until it was time to use the CD player. I had been assured that the CD players were straightforward, but there seemed to be half a dozen apertures, none of which seemed inclined to accept my disc. After five minutes of sweaty misery, I threw in the towel and called one of the students to help; I reasoned this was better than inadvertently teaching them words they had no business knowing. My student strutted up to the machine and inserted the CD player into the correct slot within seconds. He walked away, shaking his head. "I come long way from China to show my mother how use CD player," he commented. I could hardly blame him.

For over a dozen years, I taught at a school in Tokyo that was virtually prehistoric in its habits. We had blackboards in all our classrooms. At the end of every lesson, a respectful lackey would scurry in, remove the erasers, and go beat out the chalk dust. We used ancient tape recorders, almost no audiovisual materials, and textbooks with dated material. During that time, a technological revolution was taking place in the world of education, but we were blissfully unaware of smart boards, CD players, or power point presentations. After a week of fighting Xerox machines, grappling with the flickering visualizer, and trying to figure out how to enter my attendance figures online, I began to long for my old school in Tokyo. What good is technology when you have to fight it every inch of the way? Isn't it easier to scrawl something in chalk on a board if the alternative is a temperamental machine that goes AWOL when you need it most?

Then today, several miracles occurred. First, I punched in the security code, turned the handle -- and the door most obligingly clicked open. Next, I managed to use the CD player without any help. So I was in a good mood when one of my students asked for a copy of the homework I'd given the class earlier this week. Unfortunately, I'd left the material I needed downstairs. "I'm sorry," I had to tell her, "I'll run downstairs and make you a copy."

"No need!" she told me, after a brief conference with another student. She touched a button on her phone and showed me a copy of my laboriously written graph her classmate had photographed with his phone. "I make photo," she said simply.

Like I said, I have a love-hate relationship with technology. Today, it was heavy on the love.