One of the things I vividly remember from my grade school days in East Texas is the strict classroom rules. You always raised your hand, you never interrupted the teacher, and you ALWAYS said “yes, ma’am.” And, I’m pretty sure those niceties still exist in classrooms throughout the South (and across the U.S.). But, when the tables are turned, and it’s the teachers sitting behind the desks, it’s a whole new ball game.
Today was an absolute riot for Racquel and me. We watched as 13 teachers, ranging from first-years to veterans, tried to grasp the concept of how to adapt Apple-based technology to their classrooms. Decorum was out the door. The “students” chattered and laughed, spoke out of turn, and left their seats to “play” with their shiny new MacBooks. Several times, their Apple instructor had to reign them, asking them to focus so that he could continue on with his lesson.
But even with all that misbehavin’, there was one thing for certain: the teachers were all eager and open to learning how to apply the technology to their lesson plans. They know that today’s youth learns differently than that of previous generations, and in order to keep their pupils’ attention, the teachers had to become students again themselves.
It doesn’t happen often for teachers to become the pupil. But Valerie Jaques is about to get that experience after being a teacher for 21 years.
Valerie teaches fourth grade sciences classes at the Dunham School and for the next three days she’s learning how to transform her classroom into a digital atmosphere that includes brand new Apple computers for every student in the classroom including one for herself.
The problem.
Valerie has hardly ever used an Apple computer before and now she’s being asked to learn it, use it and applying it to her curriculum. During our talk on the eve of her first lesson, Valerie said she felt apprehensive yet excited about what the next couple of days would hold.
She even shyly admitted to us that she bought a MacBook for Dummies book and that she knows her 14 year old daughter will most likely become her best troubleshooting source.
Well, off to bed for tomorrow’s early morning MacBook training session where Valerie says she’ll be taking notes with a pen and paper.
-Racquel
Funny Daily Tibit:
Courtnee rolled down the windows to the car, blasted “My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion and belted out one heck of a tune as we drove down one of the busiest streets in Baton Rouge. Great entertainment, but not American Idol quality if you catch my drift. I’m sensing a William Hung part deux?
Everything’s pretty much as we left it here in Baton Rouge. The sun is still scorching hot, the food is still deliciously deep-fried, and the folks are just as friendly. And, just like before, we landed here on a holiday weekend. But instead of Memorial Day, Racquel and I had to work around the Fourth of July, a prime time for our local friends to dash off on their summer vacations.
But today was a bright spot, as we were able to reunite with Destiny Cooper, the creative writing teacher from McKinley High School. It was great to see a familiar face and we got a chance to chat with her after doing a follow-up interview. Mrs. Cooper and her class have been such an inspiration to both Racquel and me. She doesn’t stop her work when the last bell rings. She keeps in touch with her students over the summer, continuing to motivate them to excel in school and in life.
Tomorrow we will talk to another teacher, this one at The Dunham School. We’ll follow her as she prepares for a workshop this week that will teach her how to apply new technology to her class. The Dunham School, which has teamed up with Apple, is transforming their school into a digital learning environment.
Racquel and I have spent the last week working in another community…Clermont, Florida. We’ve met a lot of great people and have had some interesting adventures, so check out the blog! We’ll be back to Baton Rouge to see everyone again in two weeks! See you then!
Our last full day in Louisiana was spent taking an hour and a half drive down to New Orleans to meet a professor who urges students to work collaboratively and tap their innate ability to use and adapt technology to their entrepreneurial ventures.
Doctor Ralph Maurer, who now teaches at Tulane University, taught a management innovation class this past spring at Louisiana State University.
Maurer had two students this past spring develop platforms for an iPhone application and rising artists through a website called ireptheboot.com.
After we left New Orleans, we met the creator of ireptheboot.com, Kyle Bashay. Bashay said people like to network with like-minded individuals and his site give these artists a common ground. Bashay said that without the Internet, his venture would not be possible.
Tomorrow we have one last interview scheduled before we hit the road for a seven-hour drive back to Dallas, TX so we can catch our flight back to Syracuse, NY.
Well, it’s been nine days since we started calling Baton Rouge home and now we’re just about to pack up and leave on Friday.
First it was hard getting used to the area. As a fellow News21-er put it, you’re in a new place trying to adapt your routines of home to a place you hardly know.
Now it’s hard thinking about leaving, especially when you think about all the people we’ve meet and all the stories we’ve heard. And trust me everyone has one, some the same, some very different and heartbreaking.
Today was no different with the exception that for the first time since we arrived, we felt like we belonged.
Wednesday started and ended with great conversation.
In the morning we met up with Chris Normand, who is going to be a senior at Louisiana State University in the fall. Chris was working at KLSU deejaying the morning to afternoon shift. Chris, if you haven’t been keeping up with our blog, is trying to create an iPhone application that interacts with you the minute you walk into a store or business.
He took a class this past semester that gave him the platform to think innovatively and tap the intelligence of his electronically adapt mind.
Tomorrow we’re driving down to New Orleans to meet with his professor Doctor Ralph Maurer to find out more about the class and how he was able to create a learning environment that fostered this kind of thinking.
From there we meet City Councilman Chandler Loupe. It was there where I realized the world works in mysterious ways. The planets align and it brings like-minded people together.
When we arrived, we were greeted not only by Councilman Loupe, but also by a team of people transforming a local school, the Dunham School, into a digital learning environment where every student gets a laptop from Apple.
Next fall, the school will adapt itself to this new learning environment and create a classroom of collaboration with an emphasis on teamwork and learning.
In the evening, Courtnee and I realized just how homesick one gets when working on the road. Being away from home, you forget the feeling of being in a place that’s lived-in and filled with the comforts of home.
Luckily, we were reminded of what it’s like to be home. We were invited into the home of Saiward Pharr, who works with the NPR station. She whipped us up a nice home cooked meal, which tasted better than any item from the menu of a fast food chain or a dinner special from a fancy restaurant filled with strangers.
As we said our good-byes, Saiward made sure we could take a little piece of “home”. She sent us off with a Tupperware filled with homemade brownies (recipe courtesy of Pillsbury).
Those little pieces of “home” didn’t last long. Courtnee is finishing them all as we speak. Oh well, maybe that’s what you need when you’re away from home; a sweet treat from a new friend in a foreign place.
Sometimes it’s the strangers you meet and get to know that make being away from home not so bad at all.
One of our first nights here in Baton Rouge was spent downtown at a Live After Five concert, where we interviewed 50 people about how they’d use technology to rebuild the world.
One of the couples we interviewed actually got engaged later that night, with a romantic proposal on stage and everything! Racquel and I were surprised to find out that the couple had actually reunited after many years on Facebook. That got us thinking about whether parents and their kids use social networking sites differently. So we decided to interview the woman who got engaged and her 17-year-old daughter.
Racquel and I discovered that the mother and daughter had different uses for the internet and social networking sites. For Bridget, the mother, social networking sites are a way to reconnect with old friends, while her daughter uses MySpace to maintain her current relationships.
I think there are days you’ll remember forever. For me, yesterday was one of those days.
Racquel and I spent the morning with Mrs. Destiny Cooper and her student, Leroy. The four of us loaded into her car and together we toured various parts of the city; from the well-manicured lawns in the shadows of extravagant houses to the less desirable parts of town where children pedaled past homes with boarded up windows. We saw it all.
“You know you’re in a black part of town when the city bus passes through your neighborhood,” said Leroy, as he pointed out the areas all too familiar to him.
It didn’t take long for us to see how quickly the quality of life changes as you drive through Baton Rouge.
“We’ve only gone about a tenth of a mile and look at the difference already,” said Destiny Cooper.
During our tour we also experienced the infamous Baton Rouge traffic that we’ve been hearing so much about, bumper to bumper cars made it difficult to get around the city. While steering around a wreck that was on the side of the road, Destiny Cooper said a 15 minute drive can often take twice as long.
We took a break from the tour and the traffic to pick up lunch from Tony’s Seafood.
Racquel had been eager to try crawfish. So she, Mrs. Cooper and Leroy bought a least ten pounds of the tiny, red creatures. Personally, I can’t handle food that still has eyeballs, so I passed and went for catfish…you can’t ever go wrong with that.
Leroy guided us to a local park where he and Mrs. Cooper taught Racquel some “crawfish etiquette.” In my opinion, it’s hard to imagine any form of etiquette when you’re ripping off a little creature’s tail and sucking out the meat and juices.
Post-lunch, Racquel and I interviewed Leroy, Brittany, and other students who’d been in Mrs. Cooper’s creative writing class. These students saw a monorail as a solution to not only transportation problems, but also to crime and the community divide they believe exists in their community.
A perfect example of how technology, when applied the right way, may be able to rebuild the world, or in this case, the city of Baton Rouge.
Tomorrow begins our non-stop video shoots with people we’ve meet over the past week that we have been here. We have back-to-back appointments until we leave Friday morning for our drive back to Dallas, TX to catch our flight back to Syracuse.
On Tuesday, we’re meeting back up with Leroy, Brittany from McKinley High School and with some of their other classmates. They’re going to take us around town and show us the parts of town that inspired their poem. A poem filled with pain, hope and the yearning for technology to change and rebuild their city: Baton Rouge.
We wanted to show you just how passionate these students were about the need for change, so here are some snippets from their poem:
A false sense of confidence kept me from dangers during my adolescence.
But as I got older I bump into unknown strangers and drunk homeless people who begged me for change to spare their lives.
25-cents could buy me my very own piece of cardboard that would be illustrated “HOMELESS” or “WILL WORK FOR FOOD”….
“There is no place like home,” Alice would say, as I bop my Converse to the same rhythm she did and say the same exact words except nothing happened.
Life wasn’t a fairytale or a dream.
But I wish it was. So I could have eagle wings with a registered halo and fly away from hell.
Where it consists of shotgun houses, graffiti-infected buildings, dead folk sleeping on the sidewalks as cars pass kids playing Ring-Around the-Rosie enjoying the horrible aroma it produces.
The solution? Technology that could build a monorail throughout their city.
Well, we weren’t on the highway but a few minutes towards Gonzales when it started raining cats and dogs. The sky turned a dark, dreary grey and the rain pummeled our windshield, definitely reducing our visibility. So I did what any smart college graduate would do-I called my mother over in Rockwall, Texas to see if she could check the weather for us online. (Thanks, Tam!). After getting the all clear, Racquel and I continued on our way to the Jambalaya Festival. Gonzales, Louisiana, the home of the festival, is just about 20 minutes away from Baton Rouge…so it didn’t take us too long to get there.
As we arrived in Gonzales, we had to resist the temptation to stop at the Outlet Malls…poor Racquel, she really wanted to stop. She did, however, pull into a parking lot where we asked for directions to the festival, and where we also had our first encounter with the friendly people of Gonzales. Instead of just giving us the “usual” directions, a local woman dropped what she was doing to lead us straight to the festival grounds. Again, southern hospitality is thriving here in Louisiana.
We KNEW when we got to the festival. The smoky smell of burning wood led our noses straight to the action. There, we saw almost 30 teams cookin’ up their own secret Jambalaya recipes. Large metal pots contained bubbling broth mixed with special seasonings and pork, chicken, and sausage. All the right ingredients to make anyone’s mouth water. We got to know Steve Broussard and how he developed his passion for making a southern favorite. Watch him and his brother, Mike, in our photo essay.
After Jumbalaya 101, it was time to see how Gonzales folks would respond to our “50 people, 1 question”. We heard a variety of answers and we’ll share them with you in July. The tables were turned, however, when a local publisher/writer snapped a photo of us beside our cameras. Mike Strong promised us that we’d be in the next issue of Ascension Magazine and we’re going to hold him to it!
Thanks to a lot of outgoing personalities, Racquel and I were able to complete our task in two shakes of a lamb’s tail (a southern sayin’ meaning “quickly”). We obviously couldn’t leave without some traditional fare. Racquel sampled some of that delicious jambalaya while I definitely went for the extra-long corn dog, slathered in mustard, a Texas-sized dill pickle, some tasty cotton candy and a tall lemonade to wash it all down. I’m obviously not embarrassed to show I can eat my weight in food. There were also some great southern rock bands playing, we’ll add some video of that too.
Overall, we had a great time out in Gonzalez, and we’re ready to call it a night. Goodnight!