By TERRY CUMMINS
newsroom@newsandtribune.com
NEW ALBANY —
A small, slate blackboard hangs on the wall above the phone in my kitchen where I record important messages. I used to keep stuff stored in my cerebral memory bank, but it went bankrupt year’s ago.
The slate is what my mother used for writing her lessons at the Short Creek one-room school. Back then when the spelling lesson was over, kids spit on the slate, rubbed it off with a sleeve and were then ready to write numbers. I attended a modern four-room school and used a writing tablet and a pencil with an eraser on top, which was an improvement over saliva. The slower kids did as much erasing as writing. Some of my papers looked like they’d been splattered with mud.
After the crops were in, all I needed to start school was a thick tablet, a pencil, a jar of paste and a box of eight coloring crayons. The rich kids always had a box of 24 or more crayons, and that’s one reason they got better grades. Some of the weird kids ate their paste, and that’s why schools changed to glue until the bad kids began sniffing it. Paste doesn’t taste as bad as it sounds. The only other things I needed were two new shirts, new bib overalls and a pair of new shoes, which always hurt my feet. We shed our shoes in late March and put on the new ones in September. Walk out the front door in my new clothes, hair slicked back with tonic, my tablet, pencil and a lunch bucket, and I was ready for some schooling.
Seven years ago — 68 years after I enrolled in the first grade — my youngest grandson enrolled in kindergarten. When he came home after the first day, I asked him, “Do they have computers in kindergarten?” He said they did, but was disappointed that, “They’re not hooked up to the Internet yet.”
Kids today can punch on a computer better than I could keep between the lines on my tablet. But if we want to insure that no child is left behind, then each of the one billion children on earth needs a laptop. One Laptop Per Child is a program, initiated by college-professor Nicholas Negroponte, and has already placed 35 million laptops in 40 countries and in 19 languages. The laptops are encased in bright colors, are wireless, waterproof and sturdy enough to withstand damage from dropping. The battery can be recharged by a one-square-foot solar panel and the current cost of the total package is $182.
Most governments of undeveloped countries, businesses and the UN are highly supportive of the endeavor proclaiming it as an “end of isolation.” A child living in a hut in Afghanistan can now e-mail his friend in another village. Reports indicate that children have adapted amazingly well to the new laptops in places where slates, tablets and books were scarce or non-existent.
In a few years, schools across America will be torn down except for gyms and music rooms to appease band and jock parents. Each home will convert the dining room into a one-room school equipped with digital things including a laptop, Kindle and a snack bar. A Kindle is a page-size, thin, digital contraption, practically capable of storing the Library of Congress, and it’s easy to use. Start it up, scroll through the thousands of books available, hit “buy” on the one you want, and it’s wirelessly downloaded on your Kindle in about 10 seconds. Prices for books, subscriptions to magazines and newspapers range from zero to $10 dollars. Amazing.
Your child will not need shoes, erasers or glue. Daddy can go to work and mother can go shopping, feeling secure their child is diligently working at one of the five screens in the, Family Education Center, which looks something like the NASA control center. Your child will complete busy-work papers, e-mail them to his teacher, who is slouching around in pajamas. She spends her day grading these papers and e-mailing them back to her 49 students. (Think cost savings.) Your child might get bored until his daily five-minute interaction conference with his teacher, who he’s never seen live. Web cams attached to the laptops permit a digital conference where teacher and student can converse and see each other’s face on a screen. If at anytime, your child wants to pray in the FEC, it’s constitutional.
Back in the old days, a good quality slate would last for eight years.
Contact TLCTLC@AOL.com personally.
