What Would You Be...?, by Courtney Cheng

Techno'd

empowering women, families, and youth-at-risk through improved literacy, increased positive media, and tools for living.

It was last academic year, and the end of the first marking period was nearing. A colleague and I were reminiscing about “back in the day,” that being the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. The sum total of our teaching amounts to just over fifty years, so our memory lane had enough length for some serious strolling. The subject, appropriately enough, was grades. Not the grades our students would earn, but rather how we used to record them. “Remember when we would all pile up in the library Reading Room to put in our grades?” my fellow teacher said, her voice betraying a nostalgia for what she clearly believed had been a golden age. I then recalled teachers armed with grade books, calculators and lethally-sharp pencils, packed into the Reading Room where, looking like sentinels, were eight small, dull-green steel file cabinets placed on some of the wooden tables. Each had several drawers containing a yellow card listing the courses every one of our young charges were studying and for which they would receive a grade; a grade every single teacher would write into the appropriate course box by hand.

Submitting grades by the deadline was stressful enough, but the Reading Room Ritual, as I called it, amped up the craziness. Teachers reached over, around, and sometimes, it seemed, through each other to get to a grade card drawer. “I need the ‘D’ tray; you got it?” “Who has Anna Bergman?” “Oh, excuse me...sorry I stepped on your foot...” “So how’s your husband doing?”
Organized mayhem, to be sure, but full of mirth. The teachers saw and talked with each other, and joked their way through the tedious but necessary process. A few hours and several dulled or broken pencil points later, we got our grades in. On time.

In 1997, the steel cabinets were replaced with desktop computers, and almost overnight we had to come up with clever user names and passwords so impenetrable that not even Houdini could have cracked them so we could access the ever-growing number of websites to carry out our work. The old yellow cards that bore the handwritten names of our students and the handwritten grades their teachers had awarded them got the heave-ho.

We are now virtually (I don’t use this word lightly) a mouse-click away from complete digitization: attendance, report cards, inter-departmental communication, and textbook tracking have all been scooped into the technological embrace. The new telephones we all received a few months ago are sleek and digitized, but they hardly ever ring since we e-mail each other rather than dial an extension. Not only almost paperless, we are also nearly speechless.

Technology has also changed my personal life. Instead of writing letters, I can dash off an e-mail to friends and overseas relatives. Whereas I used to search for information in my encylopedia, I now “Google” what I need and find it in seconds. I own an e-reader and have downloaded several books, ranging from novels to the Bible. I bank and shop online, and the photos I take with my digital camera make me look like a pro.

While technology has made my life neither better nor worse, it has made it easier, which is a very different consideration. The former drudgery of many tasks has been eliminated, for which I am grateful. But despite the breathtaking feats it performs, technology can never fully replace uniquely human connections, such as sending or receiving handwritten letters, holding and turning the pages of books -- or having my foot stepped on while I enter a student’s grade.

A lifelong resident of Queens, New York, Pamela A. Lewis is devoted to (real) books and the arts. When not writing, she teaches French to eager francophile high school students.