'Please, for the sake of our children and their futures, do not mistake technology for the power and poignancy of an effective teacher,' writes Jeremy Adams, a high school and college political science teacher in Bakersfield for latimesopinion.
Help the Los Angeles Times reimagine what California should look like after the COVID-19 pandemic ends.Lawmakers and technocrats are often intoxicated by the latest technology in education, enchanted by the potential to “transform” education overnight or make schools hives of policy experimentation.
But using Google Classroom does not empower a teacher to keep a struggling student after class to ask, “What’s wrong?” YouTube videos can’t make eye contact or gauge a student’s level of engagement. Zoom meetings will never capture the tactile nature of powerful teaching that exists on a personal level. Yet we live in a world and in a time where the most important adult relationship for many school-age children is with their teacher. When I began teaching more than two decades ago, I never imagined I would have students tell me, “No one in my home cares about my success the way you do.” I never thought I would hear stories from the young men in my classes about physically protecting their mothers or younger sisters from abusive live-in boyfriends. Or that my students would ask me to attend senior awards assemblies because they had no other adult they could count on to show up. These brutal realities make an appearance in the classroom almost every day. In their first 18 years of life, . Yet teachers are expected to socialize children, prepare them to be responsible citizens, cultivate interpersonal skills, encourage successful time management, and fortify students’ capacity to flourish in an increasingly harsh labor market.Let us not forget that the wonderment of the classroom, the source of its transformative possibilities, is rooted in the humanity of the people gathered in the same place, at the same time. The best teachers are not maestros of education apps or virtuosos of virtual instruction. They are savants of human transformation because of their capacity to forge powerful connections with their students, inspire their best efforts, and engage them in meaningful and personal ways. There are no shortcuts on the path to changing a human life, no technological panaceas. Powerful teaching is about an adult believing in us, showing us a higher path. If some of us see stars it is often because a teacher tilted our heads toward the heavens. Ask students what they think about the last two months of instruction — from kindergarten to college — and is that the magic of the classroom is lost when it becomes a process carried out over impersonal, awkward platforms.Technology, no matter how advanced, should simply be a tool, an additional arrow in the pedagogical quiver of teachers. Please, for the sake of our children and their futures, do not mistake technology for the power and poignancy of an effective teacher. Jeremy Adams is a high school and college political science teacher in Bakersfield, and author of “Riding the Wave: Teacher Strategies for Navigating Change and Strengthening Key Relationships.”
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