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PowerPoint just latest teaching innovation that's sleep-inducing

Thursday, April 7, 2005

By David McGrath, guest columnist

Bill Gates won't like this, but it's high time that educators got over their infatuation with PowerPoint presentations and got back to teaching.

Although some consider PowerPoint as the blackboard of the 21st century and the high-tech tool most likely to impress the principal and the PTA, nothing anesthetizes students like italicized text projected on the wall.

Before computers, the fastest-acting sedative for students ages 6 to 60 was the overhead projector, and today it's true of PowerPoint. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with the software. But it short circuits the teacher-student dynamic that infuses learning with vitality. Human interaction is still the best thing going in school, and anything that comes between a teacher and his or her students deadens it.

This year, I retire from teaching, after 35 years in high school and college. Including my first year as a substitute in Chicago, I've taught at every single grade level, if you count a week of buttoning coats and strumming a guitar for an afternoon section of kindergartners.

As in any other profession, I've had good days and bad, sometimes helping and sometimes hindering students. But I've always loved teaching. In what other profession can you explore a subject you're passionate about, positively influence others and be home evenings and weekends with your family? Moreover, I learned a great deal in the process, some of which may be worth passing on.

Such as the lecture fallacy. Unless the professor is Hal Holbrook or Chris Rock, a lecture is not very effective. And it can be downright dull. A man or woman giving a speech to 300 students for 90 minutes is disseminating information that students can more quickly, cheaply and interestingly access on their own from a book, a Web site or a multitude of other media.

Unfortunately, lecturing is a hard habit to break, as thousands of professors use no other means of instruction, and hundreds of colleges see the stultifying method as a way of herding the maximum number of tuition payers through curriculum requirements.

Which raises the question: What, then, should a teacher be doing, if the newspaper, the library, the Internet are surer, faster conduits of information? The answer is motivation. A good teacher sparks students to search out truth and acquire skills on their own. Prompting discussions, playing Socrates, organizing poster sessions, igniting brainstorming, orchestrating small-group projects, supplying hands-on experience, devising games, refereeing peer evaluation, risking experiments, standing on his head if he has to, a teacher kick-starts the process and then hops on to guide it along. Too many professors believe motivating is beneath them, that students should arrive at their schools in awe of educational opportunity, and should, therefore, shut up and take notes on the gems of wisdom passing through professorial lips.

This attitude may explain why each year thousands more students opt for online college classes and degrees, in which they get the same tepid product for considerably less money.

I may seem to be unfairly castigating college professors, but teachers learn better habits in elementary and high schools; for if they don't keep their pupils interested, they don't survive. In fact, shipping professors to the lower grades for internships might not be a bad idea.

And the first and most enduring skill they would acquire would be how to make school matter. Whether it's science or the arts, the subject must be connected to the students' lives. It's difficult to do with young students with limited experience. A teacher must draw them out, ascertain interests, fears, attitudes, so that together they can investigate how the material is applicable. This means a teacher's most important function is not to talk but to listen.

And that puts me in mind of a night class three years ago, when I was teaching Tillie Olson's short story "I Stand Here Ironing." Students were trading opinions, having difficulty analyzing the main character, a single mother obsessing over her failures with her child. That's when Samantha raised her hand.

"She's not ironing clothes," said Samantha. "She's ironing herself, going back and forth, scalding and punishing herself for always coming up short."

Like Olson's protagonist, Samantha was a single mother. She went on to relate to the class a recurring nightmare she had of her own 6-year-old thrashing in the lake, sinking underwater, while Samantha watched in horror, paralyzed on shore.

Those particular students successfully relied on each other to recognize symbols and understand themes in a classic piece of literature, and I hadn't uttered a word. Which is why saying less and listening more is the best advice I could give to those who take up teaching.

I'm going to miss it.

David McGrath is a free-lance writer and professor of English at College of DuPage. He is author of the novel "Siege at Ojibwa." He lives in Oak Forest.