Your Baby
Your Baby
By Pauline B. Gough
RECENTLY, as often happens, my thoughts drifted to my second-born
daughter -- the one who lives the farthest away. Sarah engages
in an ongoing quest for information to help her better manage
her daily life as a wife and mother. She is clearly a member of
the "dot-com generation" because when she has a question
she turns immediately to the Internet.
Last summer, she and her second-grader, Nora, were walking through
a park when they noticed tadpoles in a creek. They captured several
in a jar and installed them in an old aquarium, which they placed
in Nora's room. But what to feed the critters? Sarah promptly
went to her favorite search engine, entered "tadpoles,"
and was quickly rewarded with a list of sites, one of which yielded
the answer: boiled lettuce.
How to prune a tree damaged in an ice storm? Which flowering plants
are drought resistant? How to plan for shark fishing in North
Carolina? Where to download sheet music for Beethoven's "Für
Elise"? The Internet is the place she turns first for information
of all varieties.
Thinking about Sarah, I realized that her experiences have much
to say to the Kappan editors. We have struggled for years
to come up with an appropriate response to a frequent reader request:
"Provide practical classroom tips for teachers." Ever
aware of our diverse audience, we have always countered with the
question, "For which kind of classroom?" We know that
the National Council of Teachers of English, the National Council
of Teachers of Mathematics, and all the other associations devoted
to specific academic disciplines and grade ranges provide entire
journals devoted to classroom practice in their areas. How can
the Kappan possibly compete?
Instead of focusing on specific disciplines, the Kappan
has generally published articles related to more general issues
of classroom practice: creating an atmosphere of civility, using
intergenerational volunteers, dealing with grief, asking higher-level
questions. Perhaps, we thought, Kappan readers are not
discovering those articles because they are not clearly marked.
So we adopted a "Classroom Practice" logo to distinguish
such articles from the general flow of policy-oriented pieces
that make up the usual Kappan fare.
But logo or not, the requests for practitioner-relevant articles
have continued to pour in. Because "relevance" today
is increasingly tied to the Web, it occurred to me that perhaps
the Kappan can best meet the needs of teacher readers
through a regular column devoted to websites that have proved
useful to classroom practitioners.
Thanks to the National Center for Education Statistics, we know
that teachers use the Internet at school. And of teachers who
have access to computers or the Internet in their classrooms,
39% say they use those methods "a lot" to create instructional
materials. Moreover, newer teachers are more likely than experienced
ones to turn to the Internet for help in planning lessons.
So, teacher readers, we're appealing to you. If you are dot-com
practitioners who teach units that rely on information from the
Internet, please let us know. We'll publish the URLs you suggest,
along with your brief annotations (and your names, grade levels,
schools, and locales). Tell us the ways in which the Internet
influences your pedagogy, and we'll help you share your ideas
with colleagues everywhere. Just mail your submissions to New
Column, Phi Delta Kappan, P. O. Box 789, Bloomington,
IN 47402-0789.
The new column (as yet untitled -- suggestions are welcome) will
probably appear sporadically at first -- but it will become a
regular feature if we receive enough submissions to fill it every
month. It will cover any discipline at any grade level, K-12.
It will be your baby, and how it grows and develops will be up
to you. But, like the good fairy at a Brothers Grimm christening,
I am wishing you well. -- PBG
