Are Modern-Day Teachers Phoning it In with Electronics?

Teachers are supposed to be special people that our kids turn to for guidance and information, but what happens when teachers are phoning things in?

Have you paid close attention to the generation of kids that are about the enter their college years and the workforce? It’s terrifying. They know nothing, and very few of them are passionate about anything. Despite coming up in a time rife with change, they don’t really care about much. When a sixteen-year-old kid doesn’t know where Cincinnati is located, one has so questioned the educational system in this country at this point. Are teachers doing their jobs or are the kids really just this vapid?

Electronic Aids Requested by Teachers

I was talking to my almost seventeen-year-old goddaughter recently and we got around to the discussion of why she needed to have her cell phone in school. When I was in school, the thing was pagers, but if you got caught with it, it was confiscated. We couldn’t have electronics of any kind as they were considered to be a distraction. These days, however, teachers are asking the students’ cell phones to assist in their jobs. If they don’t know an answer to a student’s question, they ask them to look it up on their phones.

Without sounding overly nostalgic, back in the day, this wouldn’t have happened even if we did have cell phones with internet access. When I was in school, teachers cared and used opportunities such as this as teaching moments. They would’ve used the moment at which no one knew the answer to a specific question to teach us about research and how to look things up. Sure, there were teachers who would’ve rather been having a bikini wax than teaching, but for the most part, they were there to educate and they did their jobs as well as the budget allowed.

The Sad Future

Today, in Pennsylvania, we have at least two schools that have built multimillion-dollar football fields and administrative offices with furniture totaling into the hundreds of thousands, but the kids don’t have enough books. For this reason, many of the textbooks are online, and teachers are allowing their students to pull out iPads and phones during class to read from the book. Half of the teachers in our districts are posting a lot of their content online and expecting the students to complete that work as well as what they’ve been taught in class.

The Teachers of Today are Online

Well, it’s no wonder that kids aren’t invested anymore. They’re being educated by the internet. Personally, if I were a parent, I would have an issue with this. When a cyber school is a legitimate option and you’re making the choice to send your child to a brick and mortar location to be educated by someone else, why are they being taught by the internet? Teachers are very quick to defer to what Google has to offer these days, rather than being excited or engaged in the material they’re teaching.

I remember, back in second grade, my teacher decided to have us read a kid-friendly version of Tom Sawyer. She was so excited to teach us that part of historical literature and expose us to Twain’s incredible storytelling, even if it was a watered-down version. She actively engaged all of us in reading the book and taught us about complex thinking by analyzing what was happening.

A Family Alternative

My goddaughter says that her teachers really don’t seem excited about teaching anymore and for that reason, why should she be? In order to try and get this child to engage in something other than her Snapchat streak and her Instagram feed, her mother, grandmother, aunt, and I have started two different monthly clubs. Each month we pick a book and discuss it with her. We let her have some say in what we read, but it’s been successful in engaging her and expanding her lagging vocabulary. As well as the book club, we’ve also tasked ourselves with exposing her to one documentary per month.

We give her a couple of days to think about what she watched and then we talk to her about it. It’s interesting to try and build passion and concern in a generation that seems to be almost void of it.

The problem is this, however, why are we doing all the work when the teachers are literally phoning it in?