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?