Daily Star
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The Internet takes a lot of flak.
It's no secret that a good bit of bandwidth is taken up with content that can politely be termed "adult" _ or, in Internet parlance, NSFW (Not Safe For Work). Sites such as Facebook make the news for spam, cyberbullying and concerns over privacy. "Viral" videos, which garner millions of views, usually don't speak to the higher intellectual inclinations of humanity.
So it's easy to forget that the Internet, though still relatively young, has brought a lot of good into our society as well.
It's easy to criticize schools, or the state, saying that they are not doing their job to educate young people. A lot changes in a generation. Parents see different environments in their children's classrooms than they may have experienced in their own childhoods.
Some may lament the prevalence of standardized testing in schools. Longtime Sidney High School teacher Richard Townsend told The Daily Star that standardized tests should not be "the be-all and end-all" for educators or their students, and we agree. Even the most sophisticated test offers only a limited measure of a student's knowledge. And the extent to which that knowledge reflects a teacher's abilities is even more limited.
In The Daily Star's recent conversations with longtime area teachers, what was most striking was not the teachers' opinions about testing, grades or standards, however. It was their observations of how much more their students are bringing into the classroom. Before the first words go up on the chalkboard (or SmartBoard, as the case may now be), students today are already ahead of their parents' generation in many ways _ thanks to the Internet.
Students "are more aware of what's going on in the world" than their parents' generation, Franklin Central School teacher Lisa Huyck told The Daily Star.
Oneonta City School District Superintendent Michael Shea echoed this sentiment, citing the Internet for the broader base of knowledge among today's students.
The Internet hasn't just helped today's young people know more about the world around them. It has changed the way they learn _ and the way teachers teach.
"Talking just doesn't cut it anymore," Jefferson Central School teacher Stephanie Dibble said. Students "have to be engaged."
Sidney sixth-grade teacher Claudia Jenkins said students today are learning "to think rather than memorize."
The image of teacher droning on in front of a classroom of bored kids is becoming pretty old-fashioned. And that's probably a very good thing _ not only for students, but for teachers, too.
