When did we fall so far behind?

When I was a kid, the coolest things were happening at the pubic school. Way back when TV was crappy we had film strips that the teacher's pets got to advance as long as they paid attention, and regular kids got to read the slides. They we got the upgrade to the combo model with the cassette tape, and then the Cadillac that would automatically advance the slides too.

We had it all, 16mm films with projectors, pianos, band instruments, basketball hoops, and tether balls. We had a gob of stuff normal families couldn't afford, right down to fooballs, basketballs. And that seemed to be the case even when I left the country in 1988 to teach overseas. Technology had advanced some, but I was still making worksheets on a mimeograph machine. I saw my first computer two years before I left, there were three huge and clunky one-piece IBM's that read programs off a cassette tape in DOS language. Our school also had a few VCR's and televisions on which to show educational videos to our students. Only the wealthiest students had VCR's at their homes and a few families owned a computer, but at this time, most folks were still wondering what was the point. Because I was a teacher, we got a discount from APPLE and we bought an APPLE IIE with a printer. It cost us $1,300 at a teacher's discount.

When I came back to the states in 1996, one of the first things we purchased was an Acer home computer. Compared to today's computers, it was clunky too. We already owned a VCR and a CD player. But the real change was that it was very common for middle class families to have all these things too. The really strange thing was that when I started teaching again in the fall of 1997, the school had hardly any of these things. The library had a handful of VCR's for teachers to fight over and a few computers. Our school had a single computer lab. In a few years, our family purchased our first DVD player, a couple of years before the school would have one.

In today's world, our students wake up in a room where they have their own TV and DVD player. They have an IPOD with a dock for listening through speakers. They have their own computer in their room with an internet connection. However, the most dynamic technological device they own is their cell phone, which in many cases is as powerful a computer, with internet connection, as our old Acer computer. Oh yeah, they get into their own cars and drive themselves to school.

In many, many cases, our students leave their personal world which is highly technological and step into an archaic, broken down techno-deprived school world. We can't compete...well, we haven't been competing for a long time and it's pretty obvious by our drop out rates and our ACT scores and college remediation rates the price we're paying because of it.