A Moving Target

1.27.10 By Kellyanne Mahoney

It is embarrassing to admit that last weekend was the first time I picked up a newspaper in possibly over a year. This is embarrassing mostly because I had once been the staunchest advocate for print newspapers, beginning when I sat with tiny ink-smeared fingers reading the funnies at my kitchen table and extending into my young adult years in college as a journalism student, at the dawn of online media, editing my papers on the narrow, green screen of my word processor and refusing to set up an email address. It is embarrassing because becoming a newspaper reporter had been my life’s ambition—and that I had done it, for several years out of college, finishing the last two at The Boston Globe.

Since then I have become a teacher, and I mostly get my news online. I read the news articles that interest me, and sometimes even do this on my phone. But last Sunday my fiancé, (whom my students call Mr. Mahoney and think is my husband,) came home with coffee, doughnuts and the Globe. It felt almost romantic, camping out at the kitchen table and doling out the circulars to our one-year-old to “occupy” herself with (read: tear up into shreds), while we, on a long-weekend Sunday morning, divided up the paper. (And by “romantic” I mean more in line with Rousseau than Barry White.) With no predetermined search criteria, I read a story about a woman who died and left a $300,000 trust fund to her cats and an advice column discussing the proper way to divide up one’s circle of friends after a divorce.

How does this relate to education? Well, what made me think of this was the physical layout of the “Ideas” section. The cover story was about the changing nature of work, how the downturn of the economy combined with pervasive advancements of technology into people’s lives and prospects such as a national system of health insurance, has injected an entrepreneurial, almost nomadic spirit into people’s careers—that in the future it might be customary to have many small, independent projects going on simultaneously rather than one set job. On the back cover of the section, devoted to letters-to-the-editor, was the headline “Education: Are we up to the task?” Here readers discussed topics such as reform, unions, merit-pay for students, charter schools, teacher evaluations, and closing the achievement gap.

It is a heady time in the education world with many buzzwords flying around as if they pertain to distinct, autonomous issues. As a teacher I am more of a “big idea” type of thinker. And for me as a reader, the layout of this section of the newspaper, probably unintentionally, directed me to the essential question that underlies much of what I do everyday in my classroom: Am I adequately preparing my students to be productive members of society?

As teachers we wear many hats, the most commonly recognized one besides teacher is surrogate parent. One role that I have never heard attributed to the teacher is that of “futurist.” But I think we need to start thinking of this as one of our primary functions.

Life has changed so much just in the past couple of years, and all the while with technology advancing this process exponentially into the future. Even reading the newspaper, something that had once been so dear to me, so fused with my identity, in just a few years has suddenly become obsolete. This beckons me to see my students and the skills I am teaching them as not fixed in time either. I must make projections. Not only do I need to hypothesize about what evolving job niches they will need to fill, but also what skills they will need to be active and vocal participants in our democracy.

In last year’s presidential race we witnessed the power of the internet to mobilize the electorate. Even just two weeks ago, with our friends and family on Facebook temporarily morphing their profile pictures into digital lawn-signs for senatorial candidates in the special election, we could see the impact of social networking on democratic processes and on our identities as voters. In regard to the changing face of work, in 2008 the U.S. Department of Labor released a study reporting that the average number of job changes is about 10 jobs for workers between the ages of 18 and 38. And this was before the economic downturn that prompted the Globe’s “Ideas” section cover story last weekend.

Admittedly, all this change is not easy for me to swallow. I am a bit of a throwback in many ways. I value my own traditional schooling that was heavily steeped in the classics. But I am often successful at rationalizing my particular brand of atavism by making changes to my pedagogy not merely for the sake of change, but for pragmatic reasons based on my careful observations of the steadily evolving objectives of my teaching. Furthermore, I believe that we as teachers must not only see ourselves as futurists but as historians as well. We must not forget the usefulness of old forms, be they newspapers or classic novels such as “Wuthering Heights” with timeless themes that speak to the humanity in all of us—a book, by the way, that saw its sales skyrocket after it was tagged a favorite of Bella and Edward’s in the “Twilight” series.

As for this week, I return to my classroom, where I just last week took on a Boston Teacher Resident who had spent 20 years as a local television producer before choosing to become a teacher. On his first day, he joked with me that I am the first person he has met under the age of 68 to have named the TV show he had produced as one of my favorites. We live in a world where journalists are becoming teachers, and teachers are becoming bloggers. Like it or not, we must envision this trend multiple steps out and do our best to adjust accordingly.