Educators, like so many in today’s economy, are, among other things, facilitators. Like many other, similar workers, they will have to adapt and readapt to changing conditions. Unlike some professions, however, the future of teaching looks extremely bright. As innovation has improved the standard of living, there has always been an increase in the portion of the workforce dedicated to education. Educators who bring energy and creativity to a classroom will thrive. So will teachers who build strong relationships with children, because kids love classes taught by adults they know genuinely care about them.
We’ve all had teachers who made a difference. I had a great chemistry teacher in high school who made his subject immensely interesting. Chemistry seemed enthralling compared to biology. In biology, we were dissecting frogs—just hacking them to pieces, actually—and our teacher didn’t explain why. My chemistry teacher sensationalized his subject a bit and promised that it would help us understand the world. When I was in my twenties, I read James D. Watson’s Molecular Biology of the Gene and decided my high school experience had misled me. The understanding of life is a great subject. Biological information is the most important information we can discover, because over the next several decades it will revolutionize medicine. Human DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created. It seems amazing to me now that one great teacher made chemistry endlessly fascinating while I found biology totally boring.
When teachers do excellent work and prepare wonderful materials, only their few dozen students benefit each year. It’s difficult for teachers in different locations to build on one another’s work. The network will enable teachers to share lessons and materials, so that the best educational practices can spread. In most cases watching a lecture on video is much less interesting than actually being in the room with the teacher. But sometimes the value of being able to hear a particular teacher outweighs the loss of interactivity. A few years ago, a friend and I discovered in the University of Washington’s catalog videotapes of a series of lectures by the distinguished physicist Richard Feynman. We were able to watch the lectures on vacation ten years after Feynman gave the talks at Cornell. We might have gotten more from the lectures if we had been in the lecture hall or been able to ask him questions via a videoconference. But the clarity of his thinking explained many of the concepts of physics better than any book or any instructor I’ve ever had. He brought the subject to life. I think anyone studying physics should have these lectures easily accessible. With the information highway there will be lots of such uniquely valuable resources available to teachers and students.
If a teacher in Providence, Rhode Island, happened to have a particularly good way of explaining photosynthesis, her lecture notes and multi-media demonstrations could be obtained by educators around the world. Some teachers will use material exactly as it comes off the highway, but others will take advantage of easy-to-use authoring software to adapt and combine bits and pieces of what they find. Feedback from other interested instructors will be easy to get and will help refine the lesson. In a short time the improved material could be in thousands of classrooms all over the world. It will be easy to tell what materials are popular, because the network will be able to count the number of times they are accessed, or to poll teachers electronically. Corporations wanting to help with education could provide recognition and cash awards to teachers whose materials are making a difference.
It is hard for a teacher to prepare in-depth, interesting material for twenty-five students, six hours a day, 180 days a year. This is particularly true if students’ extensive television watching has raised their entertainment expectations. I can imagine a middle-school science teacher a decade or so from now, working on a lecture about the sun, explaining not only the science but also the history of discoveries that made it possible. When a teacher wants to select a picture, still or video, whether it’s a piece of art or a portrait of a great solar scientist, the highway will allow her to select from a comprehensive catalog of images. Snippets of video and narrated animations from countless sources will be available. It will only take minutes to pull together a visual show that would now require days of work to organize. As she lectures about the sun, she will have images and diagrams appear at appropriate times. If a student asks her about the source of the sun’s power, she can answer using animated graphics of hydrogen and helium atoms, she’ll be able to show solar flares or sunspots or other phenomena, or she might call up a brief video on fusion energy to the white board. The teacher will have organized the links to servers on the information highway in advance. She will make the list of links available to her students, so that during study times in the library or at home, they will be able to review the material from as many perspectives as they find helpful.
Think of a high school art teacher using a digital white board to display a high-quality digital reproduction of Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières, which shows young men relaxing on the bank of the Seine River in the 1880s against a background of sailboats and smokestacks. The white board will pronounce the name of the painting in the original French—Une Baignade à Asnières and show a map of the outskirts of Paris, with the town of Asnières highlighted. The teacher might use the painting, which presaged Pointillism, to illustrate the end of Impressionism. Or she will use it to get into broader topics, such as life in France at the end of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution, or even the way the eye sees complementary colors.
She might point to the orangish-red hat of a figure standing on the far right side of the composition and say: “Look at the vibrancy of the hat. Seurat has tricked the eye. The hat is red, but he has added tiny dots of orange and blue. You don’t really notice the blue unless you look closely.” As the teacher says this, the picture will zoom in on the hat, until the texture of the canvas is apparent. At this magnification, specks of blue will be obvious, and the teacher will explain that blue is the complement of orange. A color wheel will appear on the white board, and either the teacher or the multi-media document itself will explain: “Every color on this wheel is arranged opposite its complement. Red is opposite green, yellow is opposite purple, and blue is opposite orange. It is a quirk of the eye that staring at a color creates an afterimage of its complementary color. Seurat used this trick to make the red and orange hues of the hat more vivid by sneaking in dots of blue.”
Computers connected to the highway will help teachers monitor, evaluate, and guide student performance. Teachers will continue to give homework, but soon their assignments will include hypertext references to electronic resource material. Students will create their own links and use multi-media elements in their homework, which will then be submitted electronically on a diskette or across the highway. Teachers will be able to keep a cumulative record of a student’s work, which can be reviewed at any time or shared with other instructors.
Special software programs will help summarize information on the skills, progress, interests, and expectations of students. Once teachers have enough information on a student and are relieved of a lot of tedious paperwork, they will have more energy and time to meet the revealed individual needs of that student. This information will be used to tailor classroom materials and homework assignments. Teachers and parents will also be able to review and discuss the particulars of a child’s progress easily. As a result of this—and of the common availability of videoconferences—the potential for strong parent-teacher collaboration will grow. Parents will be in a better position to help their children, whether by creating informal study groups with other parents or by seeking additional assistance for their children.