Philadelphia

“But it’s not about technology.”

Marcy Hull just threw me a curve ball.

Tuesday, Sabina and I visited Hull an educator at Science Leadership Academy, to discuss “Youth & Technology.” When we met with her on the second floor of SLA, inside the school’s library, the school had just cleared out for the day, but students were still buzzing around (“they don’t like to leave. Come 6 pm we have to drag them out. Literally,” Hull explained).

This past 2 weeks, we spent several days with various SLA staff and faculty members, attending classes, hanging around and talking, often for hours at a time, about technology and various approach to teaching.

Hull is cheerful and engaged, an enthusiast about everything from kids, to dogs and yoga.

I asked her to give us examples of some of the miracles technology had made possible for students at SLA. I had rather naively and wrongfully assumed that that’s what we were all gathered to talk about.

That’s when she threw the curve ball.

And I struck out. Big time.

Hull is the technology coordinator (and Digital Arts teacher) at SLA so it came as something of a surprise when she said that it wasn’t about technology.

“Seriously that’s not what this school is about,” she insisted, smiling. “It’s about so much more than that.”

“First of all what does technology means? Everything is technology. It doesn’t mean anything.”

To have the technology coordinator make such ungodly statement seemed an advanced kind of heresy.

This is not to say that Hull isn’t, above all, pro-technology. It’s just that she sees it less as an entity than as a way of looking at, of being in, the world.

It’s about the big picture, she says. “Technology is just a tool.”

At a time when education no longer feels like an inalienable right for many kids around the city, for SLA students, however, technology is often a matter of exploring or fulfilling half-understood desires (freedom, customization, speed, innovation, entertainment, collaboration, etc).

Technology is just a tool.

It isn’t easy to teach from scratch, although, to listen to Hull, it’s sound like a lot of fun.

Many schools have structured themselves, largely for the convenience of complex bureaucratic systems, around standard, one-size-fits-all ways of administrating teaching but not necessarily the best methods of learning.

So yes, every student gets a laptop. So what? What does it really mean then?

Technology is just a tool.

Hull’s methods of instruction _ pluralistic, laissez-faire, diverse, inclusive, tolerant, no-holds-barred, daring, tough_ have more in common with the kind you see in a liberal arts college, where the focus is on learning how to learn, than with a standard public school curriculum.

Her approach to teaching is very Socratic in a way.

When the approach works, the effect can be significant. Several years ago, a student named John wandered into Hull’s office when she was teaching in West Philadelphia at Shoemaker Middle School, one of the district’s most troubled schools (Since then the school has been shut down and replaced by a charter school).

Sitting next to Hull in the library, the 17 year old talked about his relationship with her. It was born because of technology (“He was constantly asking questions,” Hull said) but essentially based on trust.

It’s not about technology

One day, after Hull had left Shoemaker School for SLA, she asked John to join her there.

School at SLA wouldn’t be easy, she told him. He’d have to arrive early each day; he’d have to do stay after school to do his homework until 6 p.m. each day.

That day Hull made a commitment to get John to college.

Hull reminded me of another teacher we met today at a different school: Miss Cooper at the School of the Future.

Both Hull and Cooper share a sharp intellect and a bluntness that can come across to some as curt. Both use technology as a mean to an end. No more.

Like Hull, Miss Cooper, 23, is demographically quite a bit different than her students; she is white with bright red hair, a full complement of freckles, and is from Eerie, Pa , but she seemed to have built a rapport with her students (most of whom are poor African-Americans from West Philly), in part by encouraging them to talk.

The students all arrived in her classroom performing well below the mean. Cooper, who is in her second year of teaching, says that she and her colleagues worked day and night to prepare for their classes, and saw their group of kids go from the bottom of the heap (“We had to teach them how to save [documents on their laptops]”) to where some of the kids know “more than [we] do.”

Still, despite all the technology the school offers the majority of these kids will never go to college (students in Miss Cooper’s class had just received their SAT results that day we visited and a majority of them did poorly and will not be able to pay for another test to improve their score by the time graduation rolls around).

Overall, I was very, very impressed with Miss Cooper’s ability to connect with and motivate her students, some of whom were only a few years younger than she was.

“Sometimes, you just can’t make up for what they missed [before coming to the School of the Future],” Cooper said. And technology alone is not going to solve the mind-numbing problems surrounding the education of poor minority kids.

Because, it’s really not about technology.

At SLA that message gets hammered home in the classroom. Classes are informal in structure and have an art-school feel: students, wearing whatever they pleased_ T-shirts and jeans, shorts (and even the occasional pajama-like bottoms) _ are up and down and walking around the room, clustering around their projects and discussing them.

Hull told me she pushes her students not to just follow instructions. Her style of teaching encourages questioning and pushing back.

And that made me think… and reconsider.

When we started this project our goal was to report on “Youth & Technology,” while thinking outside the box. But somehow, along the way it seems that I got caught up inside that very same box I was wary not to be trapped in: the technology box.

So now I have a dilemma: I am supposed to report on Youth and technology.

But it’s really not about that, is it?

“I held the pencil for a while. I didn’t want to use it; since

they aren’t making them anymore, you have to conserve

Thoreau’s pencils.” –From Robert Sullivan’s new book “The Thoreau You Don’t Know” ((New York Times Book Review)

“I miss paper and pencil. That was the best.”

Shamece Cross is 15. She is a ninth grader at Philadelphia School of High School of the Future, and she is giving us a tour.

The school, located in West Philadelphia, in one of the city’s poorest neighborhood, is a $61.4 million project initiated by former head of the Philadelphia school system Paul Vallas (who now runs the New Orleans Recovery School District) with help from technology giant Microsoft.

For many years now, the central debate in American education has been over just how much schools can do to improve the low rate of achievement among poor children. Many believe a school like The School of the Future can be a good start toward consistent and measurable progress. The school, which uses a lottery system (when a computer randomly allocate new children to sought-after schools like The School of the Future), has in fact an “open enrollment” policy, meaning it accepts every students selected in the lottery from anywhere in the city, regardless of academic performance.

And on top of that every student gets a laptop.

“I looove my school,” Shamece said outside the state-of-art auditorium. ” But I miss the feeling of having a bookbag and books. [Because] It actually makes me feel like I’m in high school. Now I’m carrying one laptop around. It’s boring…”

I was chocked and somehow troubled by Shamece’s declaration. It was innocent, it meant nothing. But to me it suddenly meant everything. Did you just say that you miss the books?

She nodded. “Yeah, I miss it a lot…”

Her voice trailed off as she lead us in a classroom.

I was lost.

How can could she say that she misses the pencils, the standardized paper, the spiral notebook, the lesson books, and the weighty feel of a bookbag when she went to a school like this! She was issued a laptop, a digital camera…I just couldn’t understand.

I followed her in that classroom and everything made sense…

The bare-bones classroom and its soothingly bright lighting had the feel of state-of-the-art corporate meeting rooms: no pencils, paper or printed textbooks (the library has four books total I think). Chalk and blackboards were no where to be found as well. Instead? plasma, flat-screen television and high-tech whiteboard video projectors. The school uses a Web-bases education software so that students, teachers and families can be linked through networks. But sweet Jesus, was this a high school or a college? Frankly, at one point I couldn’t tell anymore.

I was knocked down by the slap of luxury and the lucullan feast of technology. Knocked down.

But what Shamece said to us earlier [about missing paper and pencil] started to make more sense to me as we went along with our tour:

All that technology was great. But these students were still kids…

And I know the school is doing a terrific job preparing its students for a technology-driven world and closing the arguable digital divide between students who have computers at home and those who do not. I know that.

But at the same time I couldn’t help but feeling like Shamece that day: nostalgic.

Consider the pencil for example. Historically pencils have always stood for thinking and creativity; it is the tool of thinkers, planners, drafters, architects, and engineers or doodlers like me. But it is also the toy of kids…

And she is still a kid.

“I miss paper and pencil. That was the best.”

IT’S HOT. Afternoons in Philadelphia have been pretty much brutally hot since we got here, but today, was downright perverse.  Anyway…

We met Michele Jackson and her son Ryan, who is a student at Science Leadership Academy, one of the two charter schools Sabina and I are working with.

Ryan, came to Science Leadership Academy last year from Gesu school, an independent Catholic school in North Philadelphia educating children from pre-K through eighth grade.

At Gesu, which mostly comprised a demographic generally considered one of the hardest to educate_  poor African-American kids_ Ryan, couldn’t be himself.

“Oh, you’ re a white boy,” his classmmates would say to him when they saw him riding his skateboard.

 ”I don’t like basketball or football,” Ryan told us. ”If it doesn’t have to do with a computer I don’t like it. They [students] would call me a geek, a nerd, slap my hand down when I raised it in class.” 

At first, Ryan fell out of place at Gesu, but Michele’s encouragement helped a bit.

“I was at working at the time, so I couldn’t talk on the phone,” Michele said. “But he would text me when he was having a rough time, and I’d tell him ‘hang in there Ryan, it’s only until the end of the year and you’ll never have to see these kids again.’”

By the end of the year though, things had gotten worse. Ryan’s grades had fallen from A’ s and B’s to C’s in his final semester. When the school year ended, Ryan, a gifted sholarship student, had failed to make honor rolls, and Michele immediately went looking for a different option.

She searched for a high-quality public school for Ryan all summer until she heard about Science Leadership Academy, a brand-new (Sept, 2006) Philadelphia magnet school for science, technology, mathematics, and entrepreneurship.  She heard that the students at the school hardly used pen and paper and instead they used a school-issued laptop. She also heard about the communautarism the school emphasized.

Finally she heard that the school,  the school, although, publicly financed (a partnership between the School District of Pennsylvania and the Franklin Institute) like any other SDP schools, was relatively different in spirit; school officials there really try not to get caught up in or distracted by the city’s sometimes troubled and messy education bureaucracy (magnet versus charter, union versus non union, etc) .

 What matter most to them was what was happening inside the classroom. 

Michele, who is 48,  was a product of the School District of Pennsylvania ( now the seventh-largest school district in the country with a 185,000 students), monochromatically black and overwhelming poor since well over half of the students had family incomes low enough to make them eligible for subsidized lunch from the federal governement.

She was familiar with failing schools and poorly trained educators who didn’t seem to care much; thus, she understood the necessity to find a school that could provide sensitive and perceptive educators like 23-year-old Math and English teacher Matthew Kay and history teacher Diana Laufenberg. Both were known as visionaries, relentless out-of-the-box thinkers, with boundless passion for the kids. Both were committed to raise student achievement level.  Both were educators that care.

“It wasn’t just about the academic,” Michele said of her decision to send Ryan to SLA. “It’s really about the environment. He can be himself here.”

Today Philadelphia School District is changing but still paying the price for decades of substandard school system. The needs are great but resources can be relatively thin many educators told us. 

Yet, despite SDP facade of decaying walls and peeling paint, more students than not believe they can be successful.

Students like Ryan for example. 

Sabina and I went to tour the school and visit the students a few times this week. It offers an educational landscape unlike any other.

 ”Because Technology is the future,” Michele said.

And I gotta say this: watching these kids triggered parts of my brain I didn’t know existed. Seriously, the school is amazing.

The first time I walked in the building I sensed this vibe… It came rushing to me in the form of one word_  one word only because it captured the spirit of the school, the educators, the students, and the mood of the academic airspace.

The word is cool.

People use the word cool to describe a person, place, thing, a speech, an attitude, an abstract idea, the weather. It means tranquil, clear, focus, chill, calm, beautiful…

Cool is technology; a mixture of fear and fascination.

Cool is memorable. Like Tiger Woods winning the U.S. Open on one leg. How he had two eagles and a chip-in birdie in one celestial six-hole stretch on Saturday; how he rolled in a twenty-footer to defeat Rocco Mediate on Sunday; how he had to make do-or-die birdie putts on the 18th hole on successive days, with defeat staring him in the eyes; and then endured 19 extra holes on Monday to finish the thing off.

Cool is smooth, controlled, knowledgeable and forward-thinking. Like Barack Obama. How he has mastered the art of oration; his ability to get inside each listener. The sharp delivery, the rich phrasing ladened with a youthful sense of  dynamics, the artfully pacing, and the timely and skillfully placed pauses to provoke “call and response” with the audience. 

Cool is evil genius. Like Miles Davis. ”Endearing with his music, offending with his personality.” Just consider the cover of his album ”In Person at the Blackhawk, Vol. I,” on which he is draped in a pimp-like checkered overcoat. Bent over to light a cigarette, his face is made barely visible by side lighting. Engulfed in darkness, the only other face you see is that of his wife-to-be, the dancer Frances Taylor, peering intently at her man… A bad man of the highest order. 

Cool is change. Like the press in the new digital era. Like the Patriots announcing each 2009 draft pick on Twitter. Or baseball players announcing their retirement on their blog. Or even Like Barack and his BlackBerry.

Cool is a school like SLA:  free from tensions or violence.

The perfect place for Ryan.

Another day in Philadelphia, and Adeniyi and I are thoroughly smitten with this city. For me, it’s coming home–but seeing Philly with new eyes. I’m reminded each and every day why there’s NO place like home!

Even Adeniyi, a Frenchman and (perhaps more accurately) a Parisian at heart, has fallen for the city, and the people who belong to it. On the car ride home today after another long day, Adeniyi and I both expressed our longing to come back one day (and in my case, stay).

Anyway, back to the task at hand–we are, after all, talking about teens and technology! Today we returned to Science Leadership Academy, where we spoke with Diana Laufenberg, a history teacher at the school. Diana is one of those teachers every kid wants, but few are lucky enough to have–energetic, engaging, motivated, fun, dedicated to education and even more dedicated to her students (did I use enough adjectives?). Five minutes spent with her, and Adeniyi and I knew we’d come to the right place to find and tell stories about Philly teens and technology.

You wouldn’t think a history class would be a place where teens are learning through technology–but don’t tell that to Diana. Her students use technology to not only learn about, but to live history in this most storied of cities. Check out her students’ self-produced history assignments, including a series of podcasts they did on Election Day ‘08, in partnership with a school in Texas. As an aside, the most interactive I ever got in history class was a paper mache model of the liberty bell.

Here’s an hilarious video one of Diana’s students created to illustrate how far technology has left behind the traditional textbook:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkhpmEZWuRQ

The Election Day podcasts (scroll down to click and listen):
http://dlaufenberg.pbworks.com/Election+Day+2008+Project

How they did it (although Diana mentioned that the program is no longer free, as it was when her class used it):
http://dlaufenberg.pbworks.com/Using+GCast+with+a+Class

A blog from a fellow teacher at Science Leadership–it will give you a glimpse into the kinds of things the school is trying to do, and prove that Diana is not alone in her belief that technology is a powerful educational tool:
http://phoenixchase.blogspot.com/2008/02/untitled_10.html

That’s all for now folks! Good night!

“Just imagine waking up every single day with flu-like symptoms, and your entire body aching.”

Miriam suffers from fibromyalgia, an obscur and chronic disorder of widespread muscle pain, fatigue and multiple tender points. She is almost 20 years old. Sabina and I first met Miriam nearby the City Hall Tower.

It was broiling under the cobalt blue sky, but she stopped nonetheless for the “50 people 1 question.”

And then she told us about Fibromyalgia. And how far she’s come along.

Back in the day, she would go weeks enduring chronic pain and sometimes crippling fatigue, unable to do physical labor. That’s what Fibromyalgia does to the body: it forces it to surrender.

The pain and the exhaustion would be such that she sometimes found herself home, unable to go out .

It was the type of suffering that honors no season and respects no calandar.

The type no one would want anybody else to know about (even in this “age of no privacy”). She had minimal social interaction.

Until the Net came along.

Today, a junior in college, Miriam still experiences the recurring pain ; but she counters it with everything she has, mainly escaping into technology and a three-dimensional online world called vSide.

In fact, the virtual life she is living gives her some the things she is not able to do when she feels ill: the picayune pleasures of life, the shopping, clubbing and hanging out with friends.

Her story is the story of people coming together in cyberspace, of online communities helping people to regain a sense of belonging to something somewhere. It’s also the story of technology and the herculean power it wields.

As part of Fybromyalgia Awareness Month, Miriam talked to us about telling her story; she wants to explain how technology has affected her life.

She will be featured in an upcoming multimedia piece. Until then you can learn about her and the illness she lives with on her Website:

http://www.howfibroaffectsme.9k.com

Until next time,

Adeniyi

We’re not kidding when we say we want to hear your stories about teens and tech.  Don Tapscott, the author of Grown up Digital, has partnered with us to hold a national contest that centers around the way teens are using technology–and check this out, the grand prize is $1,000!

All you have to do is submit a 90-120 second video–a soap opera-esque commentary on how technology has affected your relationships, be it with your friends, family, significant others, school, community (ANYTHING).  The soap opera theme is a play on our website name, The Young and The Wireless, which itself is a play on an old soap opera your parents have probably heard of.

Your videos must be in “.mov” format and are encouraged to be shot in HD (though this is not a requirement).  If you need a video camera, Adeniyi and I have one that we can lend to you (just one though!)

Finally, you can submit your videos to Adeniyi or me by May 29th, or can be uploaded directly to our website.

Take a look at our main page for more information on contest rules:

http://youngandthewireless.com/blog/summer-soap-video-contest-rules/

Questions? Contact us: smkuriak@syr.edu, aiamadou@syr.edu

This is your chance to tell your story, and win money in the process!

Our second full day in the city of brotherly love was quite eventful! We met with staff and faculty from the High School of the Future, a school built and developed by the School District of Philadelphia and Microsoft. It was a stunning testament to the way technology is changing the way teens live and learn. We’re very excited about the possibility of working with the school to tell their learners’ stories about technology.

At the School of the Future, we were given a tour by Shamece, a freshman at the school who told us all about the cool high tech features the school offered its students. She showed us the library, which had NO BOOKS! It was truly like taking a glimpse into the future of education.

We also struck up a partnership with Science Leadership Academy, the high tech high school where Michele Jackson’s son (of whom we spoke in an earlier post) attends school. Science Leadership is truly a haven for young techies! Everyone was kind, enthusiastic about technology, and eager to help us! We were even able to do a mini presentation to all the faculty during a staff meeting.

And finally, we found the perfect place for us to shoot our “50 people 1 question” segment–the courtyard at City Hall where Broad and Market streets meet. I’d remembered how beautiful and busy that little area was, and when Adeniyi and I checked it out together, we knew we’d hit the jackpot.

More to come (and pictures)!

Today, Adeniyi and I hit the city of Philadelphia for the first time! It was a gorgeous day to be out and about on the streets of Philly. We met some great people, including a parent of a student who goes to a high tech high school, a UPenn student who, along with his friends, have developed a whole new way to work from home, and got in touch with a high school student who does her own podcasts from home.

Michelle Jackson gave up her job to give her son a shot at going to a technology-driven high school, Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia–where he fits right in. She’s worked in IT for years, but says her son surprises even her with his knowledge of the high tech.

Mike Park is an environmental engineering graduate student at UPenn, and when he’s not studying, he’s developing new ways to make money on the ‘Net. One of Mike’s friends is Noah, who has been traveling the world for months and living off funds he’s made playing Internet poker. He’s currently living on a remote island in Shikoku, Japan on a tiny organic farm operating through their wireless connection. Check out his blog: http://vagabondrtw.blogspot.com.

Julie Zauzmer is a teen who produces inspirational podcasts from her own home! She’s trying to change the world, one podcast at a time. Her podcasts tell listeners simple yet effective ways to make the world a better place. Not only that, but Julie’s twelve-year-old sister has her own website as well,www.EZgreetings.org, through which she raises money for charity. Have you used this site? Let us know in the comments section! And listen to Julie’s podcasts at 52ways.org.

In just a few days, Adeniyi and I will be rolling up to Philadelphia, equipment in hand, to tell your stories about teens and technology. We’re excited beyond belief. Philly is a dynamic and diverse city, and certainly lives up to its Patchwork moniker as an Industrial Metropolis. We’re sure your teens are using technology in ways that surpass anything we can imagine, and we want to paint a portrait of Philly through the tech lives of its teens.

So come join us, and help us tell your stories!