Almost everyone has heard his sometime in their life. I always hated it for its implied hypocrisy. I can recall hearing something which could have been construed to be about the same thing when I was young, and I knew that it was wrong. For someone in a position of power to compel others to do what they haven’t done has more than a few ethic and moral problems.

Imagine my surprise when I was looking at some ideas and recollections about how students actually use the internet… I have seen great students using this very powerful tool in constructive ways which really amazed me, but for the remaining students… I have worked as a substitute teacher, where I was given direction to allow students to use the internet as soon as they have accomplished some task (it was supposed that this would keep them ‘at bay’…). The only thing I saw was Facebook entries and YouTube videos of pop singers and amazing car crashes.

My point is that I didn’t grow up with the internet, and as such, have no comparable experience to what these (in this case, middle school) students are thinking, and what they really need. The Internet is now, and will certainly be a big part of their lives in the future, but I have never seen anything in any classroom or on any education blog where there has been discussion or implementation of actions or ideas to get students to develop some new skills and disciplines.

The Internet can be seen as almost a drug, in that it brings an incredible amount of information power to any surfer. There is so much information that it takes some specific skills with which to winnow through all of the dross. This is the opposite of the world I grew up in, where information was a comparatively rare thing, so you keep all that you can amass. Now it is about finding and using only what you need (efficiently). I would think that this change in how we deal with information (in the beginning of an information revolution!) would be one of the more important skills that we could impart to students… From what I see these days, I know I am in the minority.

As I continued with my thoughts about how to use the internet, I was doing some online searches for 19^th century paintings of note(yeah, I know, I was making a virtual AP class lesson plan…), and the thought came to me that if I were to assign finding some of these paintings online (actually this is a ridiculously simple thing to do…) I realized that without some very close supervision, a 10 minute task could almost certainly turn into mayhem in many of the classes I have taught in…

I guess that one of the implications of all of this is to think about such questions as: when is the right age to start to teach students about discipline with information? I also need to think through exactly how you teach discipline (something which is rarely taught but often demanded in many schools!), and discipline with regard to effective use of the internet?

I am reminded of being in middle school and having a whole English class taken up with walking down to the school library, and being given an hour long lecture about how to use this ‘very powerful source of information’ in a mature manner… It was a wasted hour, where both the teacher and librarian were merely ‘telegraphing’ what they were supposed to say. Nobody in that class or in my future English classes in high school remembered this tepid attempt at inculcating some semblance discipline…

Back then; this whole topic was treated as a bit of a joke…even by teachers. Things have changed, and there is certainly a need to deal with the need to develop skills in students…which we never had to develop at that age.

This is why I was thinking of the adage “do as I say, not as I do…”

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