This is long, sorry, but I think it fits in with this thread. I used to be a wood shop teacher. In 1994 our district felt that a Tech Lab would be a better way to go and so the wood shop was dismantled and the Tech Lab put in. Let me tell you about it. When you walk into a Tech Lab, it looks wonderful. Usually the floors are carpeted, the computers are humming, and the furniture is magnificent to look at. Students are assigned two to a module, there is a lot of room for them to work, and it is all set up for them to be successful. Wow, makes your heart skip a beat. It did mine.
After nine years with a tech lab, I have come to the conclusion that they are GROSSLY expensive, a management headache and a poor way to teach. Additionally they are sold as a replacement for shop class. This last item I think borders on insanity. Shop classes cannot be replaced by anything! Shop classes are where students give rise to their creative urges and they develop hand skills that they will use for the rest of their life. After nine years of using a Tech Lab, I think they can best be described as a very expensive honors science class. If that is what you are looking for, and money is no objective, either now or in the future, than by all means go ahead and purchase the tech lab, but don't give up the shop class. Keep your checkbook handy because you are just starting to spend.
Our tech lab was purchased with sixteen modules. Each module taught some aspect of the modern technical world. Our particular vendor had about a hundred or so types of modules to pick from. We chose sixteen. Funny thing as I look back on it we were in such a rush to keep up with the educational Jones's, that we selected the modules more on what they cost than what they taught. Some of the modules are BIG TIME expensive. The desks are impressive to look at. Wow, are they nice. They had better be, they cost us $3995.00 each. Oh please add on shipping and taxes. California in its infinite wisdom charges schools sales tax on things that schools buy. Now this is just the Desks. Does not include the computers, the software, the books, or the various little teaching devices unique to each module. No it did not even include chairs. Oh, the vendor wanted to sell us chairs too. (They sell everything you could possibly need, usually at higher prices.) However, get this, the chairs they wanted to sell us had wheels on them and cost $100.00 each. Stop for a second and imagine seventh and eighth graders with wheeled chairs. Remember when you were in seventh and eighth? Wouldn't chairs with wheels have been fun? Well you say, "just a small management problem." There are enough management problems without creating another. Who needs it? Why do the kids need wheeled chairs? The wheels will wear out and be costly to replace. As it turned out we found chairs at $19.95 each that were quite suitable, matched the décor, had no wheels, and every last one of them is still very serviceable and still in use and so help me I've had a number of kids who weighed over three hundred pounds. Now you say, why is he obsessing on these chairs? Because I do not believe that these tech labs are well thought out, except to the degree that they make money for the vendors, and the chairs are symptomatic of lack of thought. By the way, we need new carpeting but there is no money, thank God for duct tape.
In our classroom which, by the way, is about 2400 square feet, we have two what I will call islands that are four desk clusters. These sit out in the middle of the room and you can walk completely around each of them. They are about eight feet tall. They require that the wiring come down from the ceiling or up through the floor, a costly procedure. But worse, consider this: Have you ever hunted squirrels? The squirrel naturally goes to opposite side of the tree from the hunter. Kids are similar. The student who is up to mischief instinctively goes to the opposite side of the module cluster from where the teacher is. About five years ago I purchased three of those security mirrors that you see in convenience stores. To a degree this ameliorates the problem. The point is I want to be able to see every square inch of this place. I do not want any blind spots. I believe these blind spots are just another lack of thought on the part of the vendor.
Lets go back to the $3995 plus, plus shipping, desks. Part of what sold us on this vendor was that the desks were reputed to be well built. Over the last five years, I have been fixing part of the shelving. On the modules there is a 3 foot span that has a solid piece of reinforcing on the bottom of a piece of 3/4 oak veneer. These were stapled together, over the years the staples have been pulling out, and the two pieces are separating. As this happens, I, like a good shop teacher, have been gluing and screwing them back together. In addition, as I do it, I find, often to my chagrin, that the oak veneer has many voids in it. The screw collapses the veneer when the screw happens to go through a void. Wow only $3995.00 plus tax plus shipping.
The management of these tech labs is easy as pie if you have students who have initiative and intelligence. The way it is supposed to work is that the student sits down, logs into the computer with their identification data and, then the computer tells them, or prints on the screen what they are supposed to do. If the kids are not intelligent, or lack initiative, or are too busy chatting with their partner, the work will not get done and after five or ten minutes they will want you to tell them what they are supposed to do. I don't mind telling them, but it gets hectic if you consider that my periods are
50 minutes long, and with 16 modules I have an average of three minutes per module. By the way the vendor must not expect you to do any teaching because I get letters from them addressing me as "Dear Facilitator". Every one of the modules has a place on it where it says that today you instructor will come by and evaluate such and such. Is this part of the three minutes or is there another block of time that has been hidden from me? Every now and then one of the computers will break down. It is getting more frequent lately. Sometimes seriously!!! Two years ago one of my new computers broke down. When I called , the Vendor's people said, "oh yes you have what we call the blue screen of death." It was in May thank goodness. They told me to call Dell and they would help. They have a two year on site maintenance agreement. Ha Ha it consists of calling Dell and listening to music for a while until someone answers the phone. The help I got on the phone was worthless. The only thing that saved me was the fact that in August we bought more modules and the vendor sent some people to install them and they fixed whatever the problem was. I feel like Captain Hook, the alarm clock, and the Crocodile, wondering when it will break down again and I will be on my own to get it fixed. When a computer breaks down you have students with nothing to do. Since much of their progress is recorded on the computer, you are up the creek until it gets fixed. Oh yes and God help you if a virus ever gets on your system.
Most of the modules have flaws in them as far as what they teach. Some flaws are big some are little. The whole thrust of my statement is that they were in a hurry to jump on the computer bandwagon and get some of those computer/educational bucks that were flowing in the
90's. These tech labs are and will be expensive and you'd better be ready to spend about 30 to 40 thousands every 5-6 years when the computers you have become outmoded. Some of my modules are still operating with the old Macintosh computers that were sold to us in
1994. They are getting problematic and it is harder and harder to get parts and repair work done and there is no money to buy the new modules that use Windows and Dell computers.
In all of this you have to ask yourself, "what are we gaining by going into computers.? It is not as if you're teaching computers, you're using computers to teach. A good teacher, when teaching something, will notice when the lights go on in a student's eyes. The computer will never notice this and you have no idea how a student is doing until the fail a test. By then the module is over and a new student is on the module and you can't have the failing student re do it. As I said this whole thing was never really thought out. Back in the nineties everyone just hopped on the computer bandwagon with no idea where it was going.
I went to college in the 60's. At that time my professors said that often times shop is used by the administration as a dumping ground for poor academic performers. I don't think of shop as a dumping ground but rather as a place where students can develop their skills that aren't used in the academic classes. The Tech lab does not lend itself to developing the same skills that a shop develops, but the criteria for sending a student to tech lab seems to be the same. I get the resource students, whose usual problem is that they are poor readers. We also had a program here called the alternative school. In it students had mostly one teacher for all their subjects except gym and elective. These were kids who had problems in the standard classroom setting. Often they were discipline problems, I get them. They love the hidden spaces behind the module islands. ( see my paragraph above on these) Oh yes, I also get the kids who are what we call special day class. Some of these kids have trouble writing their name. I get them. The tech lab is no place for these kids, mainly because there is not enough of me to go around. Bless her heart I even had a child who suffered from Down's Syndrome. She was a really nice person but she had no idea what was going on.
All of these kids I can do something with in a shop. It is not hard and the kids by and large love shop. When we abandoned the shop nine years ago I saved some of the machinery and tools. I have a small shop about 600 square feet off to one side of the big room. I have an after school woodworking club that I have more students joining than I have room for. In a phrase, they are voting with their feet.
Somewhere in our educational sojourn we have entered into a love affair with the computer. At first everything is peachy keen but then the grim realities surface and the computer is not the educational end all be all that we think it is. Sometimes it seems like all we have to do is say computer and the educational checkbook goes into autopilot. By the way, whenever you hear the phrase "Technology" it is a buzzword for "canned learning using computers." Remember when we were kids and they had those filmstrips that had a tape deck with them? You would show a frame and the tape deck would give some information, then a beep and you would advance the frame, well computers are another form of that.
If you watch the news there is starting to be awareness that the US is losing its manufacturing edge. Part of it is globalism, and part of it is that we no longer are producing students with craft skills. Are we going to contract every thing out and if so, to whom? I would venture it takes a nation about five generations to become technically advanced and if we are not careful we can lose it in a generation. Ever wonder how Japan and Germany were able to rebuild so quickly after WWII? It is because they had a huge technically trained population with knowledge in their heads that allowed them to rebuild. We are losing this advantage and the loss of shops accelerates it.