11.26.16

Washed-out faces smiled up at me from the past: crew cuts on the boys, bobbed or curled hair on the girls, bib overalls and flower-print dresses and plain white t-shits, my father a skinny ten-year-old grinning obediently among them.
I sat at my parents' kitchen table. I held a red vinyl folder. It was a photo album assembled for an elementary class reunion. The front cover read "Lott, TX, 1956-57" written in swooping black marker.
A page was dedicated to every student. Below each flashbulb-blanched snapshot, composed in studiously slanted cursive, was a photocopied account of the pupil's life, a writing assignment somehow salvaged by a self-appointed historian or else saved decades into retirement by their teacher. It was Thanksgiving break. I had no lessons to plan, no essays to grade. And so I examined all twenty-six pages like an archeologist with a magnifying glass blowing away chalk dust.
They were rural Central Texas children.
They liked baseball and rock collecting and their mama's chocolate cake and Rin-Tin-Tin on the family television set.
They were the offspring of farmers, carpenters, railroad workers, men who earned a wage with their hands. Their mothers were almost uniformly housewives, proud, scrupulous, matronly.
The children themselves all hoped to grow up to be their parents. To earn a living and to have a life like the one they knew and understood. A simple life, and a good life.
But life in our new century has changed, digitized, on-demand, and in high resolution.
Turning to the last brad-bound page, I was met with a wide shot. A small classroom. Tall windows. Sunlight streamed on wooden floorboards presided over by a young hickory stick of a teacher whose job it was to teach the fundamentals. Rows of boys and girls sat up straight in their desks, looking forward to recess, perhaps, but equally optimistic about the future. It was a future that could be theirs if they only learned to read and write and cipher and, more importantly to their parents, if they were good and listened to their teacher.
Pondering this last gray photograph, I realized something: a paradigm shift, as we like to say in the buzzy jargon of education.
These students were taught to be upright citizens of their community; we now must prepare students to be adaptable citizens of the world.
This is difficult.
This is dynamic.
This is the goal of blended learning.
There is less certainty in today's world. Few children aspire to become their parents. Fewer parents have jobs that their children will be able to inherit. Much has happened since that black-and-white moment was captured on film, much yielded to the inexorable forces of progress. Yet like that prim schoolmarm of the 1950s, our objective as educators is still to prepare young people for the life that awaits them.
That was the goal in Lott, TX, circa 1956.
And that must remain the goal of blended learning in Birdville ISD, circa 2016.