The Core Knowledge Blog

An entertaining and well-written new blog is setting tongues wagging in the small corner of the Twittersphere that I inhabit.  Called Adventures in Pencil Integration, the conceit is that it’s 1897, and teacher Tom Johnson is describing ”the journey to move into the twentieth century with paper and pencil integration initiatives.”  It’s an extended metaphor for education’s current fixation on technology integration.

Here’s an exchange between Tom and his colleague, the “Pencil Teacher” called “Why penmanship class is failing our students”:

“Do you really think we need a one to one ratio of pencils to students?”

“I think it will be valuable for students.  It seems like it will probably enhance learning.”

“Yes, but they are already learning it in the Pencil Lab.  I teach them penmanship skills and most of them have already learned to put together a document of words.”

“I assure you that I won’t be teaching pencil skills.  Instead, we will be using pencils within the curriculum.”

“Tom, these kids don’t know the basics.  I see how they treat my pencil lab.  I’ve had four pencils stolen despite the fact that they are bolted to the desktop.  Yours will be mobile.  Kids snap off erasers.  I’m just worried about you, that’s all.”

I can’t blame him for being nervous.  They already use his Pencil Lab for student projects and I’m guessing he’s worried that pencil-integration will eventually phase out the need for a penmanship class.  Yet, honestly, he has done little to make the subject relevant.  Do his students analyze the shift from an oral to a print culture?  Do they look at the shifts in the world in an industrialized society and what it means for citizenship and for human identity?  Do they create projects that simulate how people will use pencils in the workplace or in life?  Do they write and read with pencils?

Clever stuff.  The blog, written by Arizona teacher John Spencer, does a nice job of lampooning the both the novelty of technology and the threat it seems to represent to some. Perhaps unintentionally, it highlights what makes some of us find the very subject tedious.  Talking about technology in the classroom isn’t exciting.  Like the pencil, the real excitement will come when we can stop talking about it, when it is no more remarkable than the pencil.  But then what will the pencil pushers have to talk about?