Fear not the student who “knows too much”
In 2006, Megan Kennedy was just an eighth grader in Hill City, Kansas, but she recently had a chance to shine not as a student, but as a teacher. Megan and several of her classmates participated in a program at her school known as “GenYes,” where students drew on their daily-life knowledge of technology to teach the teachers. Her group worked with a local kindergarten teacher to make a movie using Apple’s iMovie software so that the teacher’s students could learn a visual lesson about clocks. The kids in the young class were not the only students to benefit from the lesson, though. Megan reported that “We showed her [the teacher] how to upload the video from the camera, cut clips and add titles to the bottom of the slides. Next year, we’re going to do a Web page for her and link it to our movie.”
Several years ago in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, the local school system faced two problems. The first was that many students were graduating high school without any desire to continue their education, and some lacked the technical skills to enter the workforce. The second problem was that the schools’ computer systems were a disaster of unfinished local area networks, aging hardware, and abysmal technical support due to staffing shortages. Fortunately for Berkeley Springs High School, County Technology Coordinator Curt Heldreth had a plan. Over the course of several years, Heldreth built a first rate IT training program that provided instruction and A+ Computer Technician certification to students while turning the thirty or so kids he taught in any given year into the county’s dedicated computer staff. Students quickly embraced every project as their own, and technicians-to-be have been spotted throughout the school system for years now as they pull wires through ceilings, troubleshoot computers, design web pages, and even help to lead faculty development sessions.
To call Berkeley Springs’s program a success would be an understatement. Not only did the district save hundreds of thousands of dollars on IT costs, but individual students from all walks of life have become successful in their own rites. One of the first graduates of the program joined the Air Force, where he graduated at the top of his electronics school class, and found himself helping to teach some of those Air Force classes himself. Another student became the subject of an article in Newsweek about kids from rural areas who go on to prestigious universities; he is currently studying electrical and computer engineering, computer science, and business at Carnegie Mellon. Yet another program alumnus enrolled at the College of William and Mary, started a business, and became intimately involved in the technology world.
The lesson from these stories is clear: empower students to learn and grow beyond what traditional education is able to do, and those students will return dividends more substantial than what any pre-information revolution educator could have ever dreamed.
