Dave has been teaching high school math for a few decades now at White River High School in Buckley. He sent me some interesting comments in email. (I'm sorry Google makes it hard to leave comments on the blog.) I'm sure he won't mind if I share it here:
Nice Buckley blog post! The WRHS campus has won awards and recognition for it’s design, enhanced by our stunning view of Mt. Rainier. But teens being what they are, you wouldn’t need to search to find a kid who will tell you something inane like “this school sucks” or (one of my favorites) “this place is like a jail”. Oh, really?
As for the math test… I would need a couple vocabulary words defined first. But with only a pencil and paper, it would be an absolute grind to compute those answers. None of our students could do it, nor could most of our teachers outside of the math department. With a calculator the odds would improve somewhat. That’s not all bad. How many people could make a fire without matches? Who knows how to make a flint spearhead, or even tune the engine on a car and change the oil? But of course the real problem for educators is not that kids have lost the ability to do archaic tasks. It’s that they believe that their clever smartphone will take care of them and provide them with a living wage job.
Yes, those problems were peculiar to a particular time and place with terms unknown to most of us. And yes, we always in every age have had an over reliance upon 'modern' technology. However, schools in the urban setting are often, if not a jail, at least a daytime holding pen to reduce youth daytime mayhem. On the flip side, a friend related to me inane questions recently overheard, such as, "What is the price of the $.99 meal?" and "How many pieces of chicken are in the five-piece box?".
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