Well, most of this post isn't going to be about television in classrooms, but I just wanted to make the band name joke. It wasn't very funny I guess. My bad. When I was a kid, I used to watch the educational greats (Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, 3-2-1 Contact [does anybody remember the segment with the talking skeleton? that was my favorite part.], and Square One). None of those apparently taught me proper use of parentheses. Whoops! I think I probably did learn a lot from these shows. I remember in Canada having the option of tuning in to Bangor channels to watch Sesame Street with the Spanish segments, or watching Halifax channels with French segments. So that was a cool option, although I usually chose the Canadian version, because I had national pride or something I guess. It was probably still produced in America.
Anyway, as many of you know, I nannied a professor's toddler a couple of years ago when I still lived in Tallahassee. The kid would be allowed to watch a minimal amount of television during the day, but only on channels with no product commercials. So we usually watched Noggin or PBS. But I have to say, contemporary Sesame Street seems to be less about learning than about Elmo doing loud things. I guess this probably stems from the insane product marketability of that character, which seems ultimately wrong for Sesame Street in my idealized head. Also, most of the kids shows on Noggin (which is like a branch out channel for Nickelodeon, ostensibly to be educational children's programming, I think) are really stupid and pedantic. I know the target audience is 2-6 year olds, but a lot of the shows are pretty lame. One supposed "educational" show that I couldn't stand was Dora the Explorer. Essentially, it was an interactive show in which Dora (a young girl) would have to go on some journey. Along the way, she frequently turns to the viewer and asks questions, waiting for their response. That's fine. It's good to engage youngsters, I guess. But there were always musical numbers that repeated the same goddamn line for 3 minutes scattered throughout the show. I'm not exaggerating. It's just lazy writing. Again, some of you may say this is just a children's show, but why does children's programming have to be so poorly written? I guarantee there are plenty of MFA writing grads every year who would gladly spiff up those Dora scripts (hint hint, people who make that show).
I disagree that there is anything wrong with using television or computers for educational purposes. The language of television editing is a language that children can easily understand and process. Why is this medium any lower than books, if it can get information through to the children? There's some big educational science guy who said there were 9 learning styles. I can't remember any of them right now except for kinesthetic. And the only reason I remember that one is because it is a fun word to say. But we process information differently than our parents because of the different media that saturated our environment during our developmental years, and kids these days are processing information differently than us. From an educational standpoint it's easier to approach kids on the terms they know than just grumble about society and present information to them in what is to them an archaic method of communication. It's just one less barrier in the educational process between teacher and student. On that note, I probably think that television is almost an outmoded educational tool now, and interactive computer programs are a way better idea. But that's another topic I guess.
On that note, I was talking to some people today and they told me that in their schools growing up they had some morning tv show called "Channel One." I don't know what that is exactly, but the wikipedia article seems to imply it is a great, wonderful journalistic news program that is broadcast to 11000 schools across America. The company provides schools that buy this program with televisions, too. But the people I was talking to today about this said it was mainly advertisements, and a really propagandistic broadcast. Did anybody who reads this have Channel One in their schools? What are your thoughts on it?
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3 comments:
Does anyone remember Beyond 2000? I used to watch that at school. No advertisements, no gimics, not altogether interesting for 7-year-olds, but it was full of actual content.
I'm one of those people who like to whine and moan about 'these kids today, with their short attention spans and aversion to books.' But I really like what you say about teaching to kids in a way they understand, not in a way that the teacher thinks they should understand. I suppose if someone had tried to teach me out of my grandparents' books, I would have been bored to tears too.
But still, damn these kids today!
The big educational science guy's name is Howard Gardner. He lists eight different styles of intelligence, including linguistic intelligence, logical-mathematical intelligence, musical intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence, spatial intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, and intrapersonal intelligence. Later he added naturalistic intelligence and existential intelligence. He says this list is by no means exhaustive or totalizing.
He's been criticized for being unscientific by more conventional psychometrically-oriented scientists. Some of them claim that his ideas are impressionistic and based on very little hard, quantifiable evidence. Also, testing has shown that some of his intelligences are intercorrelated, which kind of undermines the idea that each intelligence is a more or less discrete entity. Gardner himself says that these correlations can't be taken at face value.
His work has been swallowed whole by the educational establishment, with mixed results. On one hand, more traditional g-loaded IQ tests were used for decades to railroad poor, minority and non-native English speaking students into special ed. classrooms and keeping them there for their entire academic career. So it's good that schools are becoming less arrogant and racist.
On the other hand, many teachers and education professors seem to think that students only learn from lessons that are tailor-made to fit their particular pet "intelligence." Thus the commonsense idea that a variety of lessons make learning more fun and interesting (which has been around in some form or another in North America for at least a century and probably two) has been taken to an extreme where every student has to be treated like s/he is disabled. Also, there remains the fact that a flexible, versatile domain-general intelligence exists, and is to some degree measurable. Everyone seems to have forgotten this in their denunciatory enthusiasm. Trendy bad ideas have a really long shelf life in the North American education system.
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