Where Are All the Digital Natives?

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I keep hearing about digital natives.

I’d like to meet one.

From all I hear about them in the media, on Twitter, in education conferences and elsewhere one would think there were digital natives behind every tree in every forest.

Or behind every desk in every classroom.

Not mine.

Not any of the other classrooms in my school.

Maybe they’re all out in the suburbs.

I asked my 16-year-old son, a junior in a nice suburban high school, if he knows any digital natives. He doesn’t.

I really want to meet one.

So where are they?

I work with students who range in age from eleven to 16. I’d think that would be in the prime age-range for being digital natives, but no.

Maybe there aren’t any digital natives in the Bronx, home of the nation’s most poverty enhanced congressional district.

Maybe they’re all in Manhattan. Or Kansas.

Maybe they’re as rare as left-handed dentists.

Or maybe they don’t exist at all.

Just another figment of imagination, or perhaps just a neat phrase that inadvertently tripped off the tongue of some glib presenter somewhere and stuck.

Believing in digital natives is not as harmless as believing in the tooth fairly, though.

Thinking that all kids are digital natives means we don’t bother to teach them about digital things.

Thinking that all the kids are digital natives makes it easy to forget that there are a lot of kids from poor families who still do not have access to the most basic modern technology that most of us take for granted.

Out of the 85 or so students I teach, 26 say they don’t have any kind of computer at home. Of the 59 with computers, 14 say they don’t have access to the Internet.

Most of the remaining 45 say they just got Internet access within the past 18 months.

There may be digital natives somewhere.

But let’s keep in mind that there are digital have-nots right under our noses.

Revising History

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I keep waiting for someone to tell me why an 11-year-old should be interested in the economic system of ancient Rome.

Or why a 13-year-old should care about the War of 1812.

How much do you know about the War of 1812?

Has that held you back at all?

Me neither, and I’m a history teacher.

We teach history in the wrong direction. We start with the past and work forward.

We need to turn around.

We start off teaching social studies well.

In kindergarten we teach about the thing immediately around the child, the family and the classroom.

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In first grade kids learn about the neighborhood and in second the larger community.

In third grade kids learn about the various countries in the modern world.

Then it stops making sense.

In 4^th grade NY students learn all about NY, from the earliest Iroquois days forward. Fifth grade that expands to the early explorers of Canada, Mexico and the rest of the North American land mass.

Sixth grade starts with studies of three countries in the eastern hemisphere, usually only Asian countries are included because the next unit is on ancient Egypt and the rest of the year is spent in ancient Rome, Mesopotamia and more, ending up somewhere around the Renaissance.

The seventh and 8^th grade curriculum, my current assignment, is American history.

In 7^th we start with the native civilizations before Europeans arrive and are supposed to get through the Civil War.

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Eighth grade is supposed to start with Reconstruction and end somewhere around 1976.

Here’s one idea. 7thgrade American history should start in 2010 and work backwards to try to unravel how we got into our current miasma. By the end of 8^th grade we should have worked our way back to Columbus’ “discovery.”

But even that isn’t optimal. I object to teaching history as a linear series of events whichever way we run through time.

History is not about time or events; it is about ideas and how people deal with conflicting ones.

Ideas excite people, even 8^th grade inner-city students. Ideas have meaning to them that dates, names and events do not.

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I don’t want to follow a curriculum map.

I want to explore with my students as they discover the themes and ideas that make their life what it is and try to figure out how those patterns can be changed so their lives improve.

I want to help them make their world make sense.

Maybe then I’ll understand mine.