When I was a kid, I had the luxury of growing up on a farm just across the gravel road from my grandparents' farm...the same farm where my great-grandpa raised his family (and where he died), just a few miles from the farm where my great-great grandfather homesteaded along the banks of the mighty Beaver Creek in the late 1800s. That was a long, long time ago. Things were very, very different then.
My great-great grandfather Ira Crawford, and my great-grandfather Seth Crawford, his son (my grandfather) Howard Crawford, and my dad Rollie Crawford, faced very unique challenges as they learned to settle the land and farm in Southwest Minnesota. Had they stuck to the original protocols, procedures, and mechanisms of their ancestors' generations, farming would have been very different for all of them. Instead of using corn planters and combines controlled by high-tech GPS-driven technology, my father's methods of harvesting and planting would have been tremendously slower, less accurate, and far less lucrative than they are today: In the wake of tremendous technological change, my dad would have had to continue to farm using the sun and his instincts to guide his decisions. As a result, he would have been bankrupt before his 30th birthday. Technology has changed the world, and farming has not been immune to these changes. My brother, a world-wide marketing manager for John Deere, tells me that the greatest risk today's farmers face with today's high-tech corn planters is that the equipment is so high tech they (the farmers) are at risk of falling asleep while the machinery does its work. How truly amazing that equipment can be so highly automated; how truly dangerous that humans can be so disconnected from the technology that they might actually fall asleep while the machines do the work.
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When I was a little girl, I grew up on a farm that had a single-lane vehicle track bordering its section-line. This weed-infested lane was once a county road...one that became obsolete when Interstate 90 was built in the 1960s. All of this happened shortly before I was born. I recall, as a a young girl, playing along this dirt road that was quickly being overtaken by weeds, wondering how in the world a ROAD could be forgotten. I could see I-90 from the top of the hill at the edge of my family's cornfield: I could see the semi-trailers, the thousands of cars and trucks and and tourists and people traveling across the country on I-90. They were moving quickly. And I stood there, quietly watching from the dusty, single-lane, rutted, grass-hemmed path at the edge of my family's farm.
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This afternoon, I sat in a curriculum committee meeting where I was, once again, a little girl in rural Minnesota. Again, I stood alone on a dusty gravel path that had once been a road, watching the world pass me by because my community refused to recognize that things were changing. My little town of Beaver Creek, Minnesota, withered to the point of nothingness because it refused to progress: All of the businesses were gone; families moved away; the school shrank to the point of being impossible to sustain. And...here I am again. The wind is blowing; the dust is billowing around me; and I am trying to hold on. I am attempting to holler at them: "WAIT! We can't just stand here! Times, they are a-changing! Today's world is different from yesterday's! If we wait, we will be left behind!" ... and yet, I am alone. I am unheard.
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My years as an educator are for naught, perhaps. My training, my education, my degrees, my experience, my expertise...somehow, it feels meaningless. Adults who "went to school" have opinions and experience that mean more than my own, even though my own is supported by years and years of university training, classroom experience, and data to support my arguments and recommendations. At what time will educators ever be valued for what they recommend? Will it always be true that "anyone who went to school" will be able to argue with the same amount of vehemence as a person with a master's degree in the field of education? I am absolutely certain that parents who have the best interests of their children in mind will argue as passionately as I do about what is best for their children...but when it comes to what is best for OUR children, as a district, I like to think my training, experience, and advanced degrees count for something. And yet...again and again...it feels as if they do not.
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When I visit my parents and my uncle's farm now...some 30 years after my graduation from high school and close to 50 years after the closing of those gravel roads that became irrelevant with the construction of I-90...I notice that the paths are barely (barely!) there. Had we all continued to argue that they were important passageways to the rest of the township, county, state, and nation (Interstate highways be damned!), we would have continued to sit there in our '63 Studebakers waiting...waiting...waiting...while the prairie grass grew up around us, while we hoped that the rest of society figured out that interstate highways were a passing phase. Had we waited while the traffic on the Interstate buzzed by at brain-rattling speeds, we would have been swallowed up by the passage of time had we just stood there, watching, waiting, arguing that I-90 wasn't really that big of a deal. That it wouldn't really change the world of cross-country travel that much. That our old county roads had served us well since the wide expanse of prairie had been homesteaded and divided into neat, square, corn-rowed fields...so why in the world should we change?
Funny thing. Interstate highways were not a passing phase. I-90 now crosses the country and those county roads that were lifelines in the 40s and 50s and 60s are no more than rutted paths today. Similarly, the ways of teaching and learning we cling to so frantically today (because they represent the ways we learned before the advent of technology) may be outdated; they may be in need of replacement; they may be, indeed, replaced by super-highways that are far more efficient, affordable, and equitable than the old one-lane paths of the past, where we all trudged along at the same pace, regardless of how quickly we were capable of traveling, or how much more quickly we were prepared to move across the landscape. We didn't have a choice when county roads were the only way to get from Point A to Point B. Today, we do.
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My great-great grandfather was a pioneer. He settled in the Midwest because he dared to dream the impossible. He was courageous enough to imagine a better life for his family, for his children, for those who would come after him. Like my forefathers, I imagine a world better suited for my grandchildren who may be ready for and wanting more. I imagine a place where my grandchildren, little Valori and Vince, don't have to learn at exactly the same pace as all of the other children who happened to be born at approximately the same time they were. I imagine an educational landscape where what they want to learn and are ready to learn and are capable or learning are ALL considered...and where the technology that is everywhere in the world in which they were born is leveraged to help them learn more than we could previously ever have imagined possible.
And yet...will they be educated in world where differentiation and progress and individualization are frowned upon because they are different from what we have known in the past? Will they be forced to learn in schools where they have to move at exactly the same pace as every other student because that's what their peers are doing, and that's what their peers' parents did, and that's how students have learned for a hundred years...even though there are more appropriate options available...because a few vocal folks who show up to meetings and argue that THEY know best are influencing the decisions of those who are hired for their expertise and who have made their life's work finding ways to improve education for today's generation of learners...not to mention those yet to enter our classrooms? Should I be worried about the future of education for my grandchildren...and for my college-age son, who hopes to become a teacher in the very near future? At this point, I don't know what to think.
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That of which I am absolutely certain is that education HAS CHANGED as a result of technology. There is no going back. The ballpoint pen and ruled paper for every student are no longer "technological advances." A student's ability to adequately care for a slate and ensure they have ample chalk for the day's lessons are gone. The overhead projector was cool at one point; today there are more efficient tools. Welcome to the 21st Century, folks. Homeschool your children in remote cabins in America's backwoods...or realize that the world is different from when we were learning in the 1960s and 70s and 80s and embrace the opportunities to learn that our students enjoy today as a result of technology...those that we could never have imagined decades ago. A brave new world has arrived. It is no longer the stuff of science fiction. It is here. It is now. It is the stuff our children's worlds are made of. We can fear it and deny its existence, or we can travel the short mile down the dusty gravel road to the Interstate on-ramp...and travel. We can wait at the dead-end of the rutted path that will quickly become part of the prairie pasture and lament the "good ol' days" that will never again be part of the world our future generations will know, or we can be brave enough to realize that change is part of life and embrace it for the opportunities it holds for future generations. The choice is up to us.
For my grandchildren...my little Valori and Vince and the other off-spring yet to be imagined...I choose the future. May they learn much about the world, about relationships, about giving, about servanthood, about motivation, about their role in making our landscape a better place for all. And may they all know that their grandmother was a woman who rejected the complacency of the past over the possibilities of the future.