Caught in a great divide
I have just watched Kevin Honeycut’s beautifully done video.
(I would like to thank my colleague and mentor Dave Truss for bringing it to my attention.)
This is the world I’m from, where our children are rarely seen without their ipods or cell phones. Our world is wired and connected. Our schools need to get with it and our teachers need to be curious, to be keen learners themselves and to keep up. I agree with the message in the video and in fact, the last few years of my career have been about exactly that, helping to educate teachers who are eager to learn.
But now I’m here living temporarily in Akumal, Mexico in a very different world. Yes, the people, though mostly not the children, still have cell phones. There is a layer of a wired world around me, particularly the tourists and the businesses. But the connectedness has not permeated the culture and certainly not the school.
The public schools in the pueblo here are behind gates and, unlike the perhaps beautiful, but certainly ostentatious resort hotels up and down the highway in either direction from Akumal, those that many of us Canadians have come to know intimately, the schools here are not pretty places. I am fairly certain that they don’t have internet at all. Many of the students struggle just with the requirement that they buy their own paper and pencils. When they can’t afford to attend they simply stop showing up. At the age when our children at home are choosing their grade school courses, many of the teenagers in Akumal are too often beginning to look for work. Staying in school here is not an easy option.
I’ve been to the Kindergarten or “kinder”. Kindergarten in the state of Quintana Roo is compulsory from age 3 to age 5 but attendance is not enforced. In the local public school here the pueblo of Akumal there are three classrooms, one for three year olds, one for four year olds and one for five year olds. The last time I attended there were 26 children present in the five year old class which is the largest group, about 12 of those students were girls, all with one teacher. There are no aides or special needs workers. There are more children than books. Supplies are very limited. There are certainly not computers, but then this is kinder.
So I struggle with one foot in my world from home that I watch only virtually and the other in this real world here where the children are truly struggling to learn in a more conventional manner, in a world where they are surrounded by so much but yet have so little themselves. And I wonder how does technology fit here? How would it change the learning? How might it help the teachers? Could it help to bridge the gap between the very, very rich and the very, very poor?
