The Graveyard

I've been working in the school graveyard. It's a room where old machines go to die once they are replaced by newer/better/faster technology.

In my 28 years of teaching, I've seen many changes in teaching delivery. Gone are the chalkboards.

In fact, I haven't picked up a piece of chalk in over a decade. They were replaced by white marker boards, which are gone now, too, replaced by high tech white boards which you don't even write directly on. I can point to the projected image and my finger becomes the mouse, clicker, and writing utensil. It is so fancy I can take a "wand" and "slate" with me into another part of the building and still be writing on the white board in my room. My kids can take tests with handheld clickers, built like a remote and I can instantly know their scores.

Gone also are these- the purple mimeograph machines.

Anyone who's ever used one will never forget the slight buzz you could get from sniffing the papers while they were still damp from the machine. I press a button on my computer now and any copies I program in are autodelivered to a high speed color laser printer in a corner of my room.


Another one that has gone the way of the T-rex is the globe, once the revolutionary idea of world formation that caused people who supported it to be branded as heretics.

Google Earth, Map Quest, and other programs of the like allow us now to see every nook and crevice of someone's garage in Timbuktu, if they have garages there.

A once proud staple of many classrooms is also making its quiet exit- the overhead projector. Many were the days I left school with multi colored hues on the sides of my hands gained from writing in a rainbow of Vis-aVis markers on the thin plastic rolls.

Those smarty smart boards have negated the need for these heat producing little machines.

Also missing now from libraries are the first things students used to be taught there- the card catalogue.

I worked in a large college library when I was an undergrad, and I used to love the symmetry and order of all those little cards, bursting with information untold about more books than you could read in a lifetime. However, just this morning, I was amazed at how quickly some kindergartners located the books they wanted to check out from a database on one of the many Ipads in the library.

Another bastion of academia that is hanging on by mere fingernails now is the regular textbook. Because they are expensive and bulky, more and more companies are producing e-books, cheaper, easily accessible, and much more current than the stodgy textbook.

Also gone are reel to reel film projectors, VCR's, cassette tape recorders, and even DVD players. Most new films that need to be shown with our curriculum are delivered via live streaming straight to those ever present smart boards.

Gradebooks and lesson plan books have committed hari-kiri at the dishonor brought to them through the databases that now handle record keeping.

So, as I sort through what is still usable and what needs to be discarded in this graveyard, I am reminded that in all this change, some things remain constant. There will always be kids, there will always be a need for them to learn, and there will always be a need for good teaching. At least I hope so.