Still, the provincial government, colleges, and the business community had been quietly working with Park View and other schools to upgrade the workforce. In this spirit an education professor at Mount Saint Vincent University, in Halifax, organized a project called Learning Connections. Pitching in was the Nova Scotia Technology Network. One idea was to use computers to hook students in with employers by way of the Internet to give them a taste of the workplace. It would happen. But something would overshadow it—student-to-student communication over the Net.
Jeff Doran, a technophobic English teacher at Park View, wasn’t sure what to think when he first heard of the grand plans. His tenth grade class of general students did not exactly teem with computer nerds. Many of the children had flunked a grade. “Some of them had reading levels down around grade three or four. One or two maybe would have been considered at a grade ten level. I didn’t have any goal except to try to keep them in school and keep them in class.” He also had his share of questions about the project itself. “All we were told was that we would get some computers, and then we’d get this connection through the phone lines, and the students would be able to write to people around the world, and then when the project was over at the end of the year, we could keep the hardware. I had no idea what we were then going to do with it, and I certainly had never used it before.” Doran didn’t even own a television or answering machine. “I still had a phonograph. But I didn’t even have a tape player, and I had been writing on the typewriter all my life.”
But Doran had something else going for him, something even more helpful than technological expertise. And that was an abundance of good, teacherish skills and empathy for his students, even the ones with the tattoos. He himself had rebelled. A Harvard graduate, he had fled the United States during the Vietnam War to avoid the draft. Doran’s exact political beliefs weren’t the point here, though; a dare-devil Green Beret might have shown the same ability to brook the foibles of the general students. What mattered was that Doran cared more about results than about whether the children followed every little rule. Above all he cultivated rather than feared the students’ ability to think on their own.
The Nova Scotia Technology Network provided some technical help, but would not instantly answer every question. “So,” Doran recalled, “we did a lot of muddling through ourselves and a lot of teaching of each other. And that was one of the best things. Some of the students became teachers because they learned by experimenting, and then they showed each other. And invariably they showed me, and so I learned from them. The first thing I discovered was that there could be no front of the room. It had twelve computers in it that circled around the walls. And there was no way that I could stand at any point and demand everybody’s attention. I learned that in about three minutes of the first period.”
Significantly, Jeff Doran’s English class for general students had a one-to-one ratio between students and computers, a stark contrast to those in just about all other public schools in Canada and elsewhere. Students could use the machines not only for networking but also for word processing. In fact, they started using the machines so often that in those early days, Doran was holding classes in the computer lab regularly rather than in the scheduled rooms.
I asked Doran which students he remembered most vividly from those first days on the Net, and two came to his mind: Betty* and Mac*. Betty was the only girl of the twelve students on the first day of school. “She was, uhm, kind of an old-fashioned, sweet-faced girl,” Doran said, “with one of the foulest mouths that I ever encountered. Yeah. But she had to be to hold her own against these boys. She was surly and sullen and stubborn with me, and I don’t think she ever actually came to blows with any of the boys, but she came pretty darned close.” Betty was brighter than most in the class. And yet, feisty or not, she lacked self-confidence. Many would have written her off. More than a few teachers regarded the general classes as a dumping ground. “She was pretty unimpressed by what she could do in the computer room,” Doran said. “She at first was doing most of her assignments by handwriting.”
Meanwhile Mac was hardly off to the most promising of starts. His head was shaved into a Mohawk. A reform school alum, he was short and stocky and looked a bit like a small World Wrestling Federation champ, according to Doran. Mac’s face bore scars from the fights he got into. He would regularly pound the bejeezus out of other teenagers. “I’m not sure why Mac was in school,” Doran said. “It may have had something to do with the law—either school or jail. He was not happy to be here. And his skills were very, very low. He was about the lowest I had ever seen in a student.”
Okay, so this was the raw material. I didn’t expect Doran to turn either Betty or Mac into Oxford dons—everything was relative—but I wondered how far he had gotten with the computers and the Internet.
“Well,” Doran said, “once she finally started on the computer, she started writing more than she had ever written before. And I believe that’s how you learn to write, by writing.” She organized her sentences and paragraphs better, her vocabulary expanded, and fewer spelling errors popped up in her work—not just because she could spellcheck but because she cared more. Her scrawlings in a loose-leaf notebook hadn’t looked so impressive. But now she could use a computer printer and see the same, beautiful results as an honors student doing a ten-page thesis.
“The second big difference,” said Doran, “was that she was writing e-mail to other students. Suddenly she had an immediate audience. This wasn’t some make-believe English project where we would pretend to have a pen pal somewhere and pretend to write to them. This was a real person who was going to read that message and respond right away, and that kind of feedback made her, and made all of the students, suddenly aware of the importance of an audience. And an audience in writing is something that they had never experienced before, because the audience was the teacher and who cares what the teacher thinks? Except that the teacher gives you the mark, so you just write what you think the teacher wants you to say.