Software’s Pull on Hard-to-Reach Teens

Washington Times, October 10, 2010.

Excerpt:

Forget teachers unions, undisciplined classrooms, social promotions or any of the other usual complaints about public secondary education. The real problem is that we are not playing to our children’s strengths. In an age when teenagers master complex video games, track down arcana on the Web in a blinding flurry of keystrokes, pull things out of their cell phones that their parents never knew were in there and love every bit of it, we make them put all that aside at the classroom door. We tell them to sit quietly in groups of 25 or 30 and usually (with apologies to the many brilliant teachers who are out there) listen to a mediocre presentation of an uninspired curriculum.

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Washington Times