佛蒙特州韋肖爾——穿過養雞場，佛蒙特州韋肖爾山區學校(Mountain School)就在山上。有一塊地方有時會收到一格或兩格手機信號，相比學校的木製建築群，那裡似乎離新罕布殊爾州西部的群山更近。
這個“信號點”介於馬鈴薯田和一頭名叫奈傑爾的駱駝之間，在這個位於佛蒙特州的偏僻一隅、崇尚簡約多過於科技的學校里，這已經成為一個公開的秘密。“我們處在文明的邊緣。”一名叫道格·奧斯汀(Doug Austin)的老師說道。
但是這種情況即將發生變化。
這所學校為很多來自於精英私立學校的高二學生提供一個與大自然親密接觸的學期。學生們可以去附近的山區獨自露營一天或兩天進行冥思，以及在沒有全球
定位設備的條件下練習野外定向技能。在上英語課和環境科學課的間歇，他們照看農場牲畜、劈柴、閱讀羅伯特·弗羅斯特(Robert
Frost)的作品。很多人表示，在此期間，他們不再為了搜手機信號而尋遍校園，也不是一有機會就登錄Facebook頁面了。
鑒於美國其他地方都有高速的互聯網，韋肖爾（人口僅730人）是落後的，這裡依靠鄰裡間共享的電話線，通過撥號以及（只有面向正確方向的房子里才有的）衛星網絡服務來上網，在惡劣天氣下還會中斷。但是手機信號已經開始顯現，很快信號還會更強。
今年秋天，技術人員們將開始鋪設光纖電纜，為這個小鎮帶來高速互聯網。預計不久之後手機信號也會全面覆蓋。“現在我們是佛蒙特州的第三世界國家，”小鎮文書吉恩·克拉夫特(Gene Craft)說，“我們想要和外界聯繫。”
這對於山區學校來說是一個挑戰：如何監管智能手機和其他設備的使用？對於21世紀的青少年來說，這些東西整天都在分散他們的注意力，而他們來這裡是為了融入鄉村環境和人際交流的。
該學校堅守其鼓勵“協作學習和共享工作”的宗旨，讓學生和校友制定一個相應的技術政策，決定是要完全禁止使用電話還是在有限的範圍內使用，抑或由學生本人自行決定。
很多學生、校友和教師都請求校長奧爾登·史密斯(Alden
Smith)宣布禁令。但是校長說，學校始終相信學生能夠做出正確的選擇，他說：“我們必須要在保留我們的價值觀的過程中尋求平衡，但是我傾向於相信，青
少年，尤其是我們招收的青少年，在經過引導後，如果我們相信他們能真正負起責任，他們就能夠應對挑戰。”
在這300英畝的校園中，如果想打電話，學生們要輪流在每幢宿舍樓的小電話隔間使用預付費的電話卡。根據校友的建議，宿舍里不提供互聯網服務，只有
教學樓里才可以上網；學校強烈反對新生帶DVD來或在自己的筆記本電腦上播放視頻。（即使在能上網的地方，任何需要大量帶寬的網絡活動——比如在
YouTube上看視頻，都會導致其他人無法聯網，因為鎮上的公平接入政策限制了學校的帶寬。）
安迪·夏普(Andy Sharp)今年17歲，來自附近的塞特福德學校(Thetford
Academy)。剛來的時候，他非常懷念跟朋友們一起玩聯機遊戲《夢幻橄欖球聯賽》(fantasy football
league)。但是在學校度過了大半個學期之後，他說他現在用筆記本電腦是單純做作業，只會偶爾登錄一下Facebook。“我沒想過這會發生在我身
上，但是它確實發生了，”他說，“你將注意力轉移到了眼前的事物上。”
這並不是說學生完全切斷了和外界的聯繫。很多學生都在聽時下最新的音樂，包括來自西雅圖湖濱學校(Lakeside
School)的16歲的茱莉亞·克里斯坦森(Julia
Christensen)。最近有一天，她在早上7點前起了床，為的是趕在上網高峰期之前下載泰勒·斯威夫特(Taylor
Swift)的新專輯。但那是一次例外。
“在這裡，如果你在電腦前花太長時間，人們會覺得這挺蠢的，”來自菲利普斯·埃克塞特學院(Phillips Exeter Academy)的17歲的加萊·拉爾森(Calais Larson)這樣說道，他還認為在校園裡不應該使用手機。
學生們表示，對於回到那個隨時可以被人聯繫到的世界裡，他們的心情是矛盾的。
上個月學校放了個短假，有幾個學生表示在回到山區學校之後感到如釋重負，因為現在他們不再需要立刻回別人的短訊，也不會因為無法決定參加哪個派對而
憂心。有了劈柴和挖馬鈴薯的經歷之後，他們討論的話題變成了去花園山(Garden
Hill)看星星，或者讀弗羅斯特的書，以及去新英格蘭的鄉下徒步旅行。
校方表示，學生們同意了一項政策草案：學生到校時要把手機上交給學院，在離校出遊時可以拿回；他們還可以選擇在整個學期中保留一個月電話。
校長史密斯和其他資深教師表示，他們的目標不是鼓勵學生離開科技而生活，而是讓他們在使用科技時採取更審慎的態度。
“我們的想法不是要回到‘更好的時代’，”史密斯表示，“而是回到那種用你吃的食物、你的同伴、你的工作來定義你生活的豐盈狀態的時代。”
本文最初發表於2012年11月8日。
翻譯：趙萌萌
A School Distanced From Technology Faces Its Intrusion
By VIVIAN YEE November 27, 2012
VERSHIRE, Vt. — Past the chicken coop and
up a hill, in a spot on campus where the wooden buildings of the
Mountain School can seem farther away than the mountains of western New
Hampshire, there sometimes can be found a single bar, sometimes two, of
cellphone reception.
The spot, between the potato patch and a llama named Nigel, is
something of an open secret at the school in this remote corner of
Vermont where simplicity is valued over technology. “We’re at the
periphery of civilization here,” said Doug Austin, a teacher.
But that is about to change.
The school offers high school juniors, many from elite private
institutions in the Northeast, a semester to immerse themselves in
nature. The students make solo camping trips to a nearby mountain for a
day or two of reflection, and practice orienteering skills without a GPS
device. Between English and environmental science classes, they care
for farm animals, chop wood and read the works of Robert Frost. And in
the process, many say, they stop scouring the campus for its sparse bars
of reception and lose the habit of checking their Facebook pages at
every opportunity.
As the rest of the country has gotten high-speed Internet, Vershire
(population 730) has lagged, relying on land lines shared among
neighbors, with dial-up and (for homes that face the right way)
satellite Internet service that cuts out when the weather is rough. But
cellphone signals have been seeping in, and soon there will be more.
This fall, technicians will start laying fiber-optic cable to bring
high-speed Internet to the town. Cellphone coverage is expected soon
after. “Right now we’re the third-world country of Vermont,” said Gene
Craft, the town clerk. “We’d like to be in touch.”
That presents a challenge for the Mountain School: how to regulate
the use of smartphones and other devices that serve as a constant
distraction for 21st-century teenagers, who are here to engage with the
rural setting and with one another.
True to its mission of encouraging “collaborative learning and shared
work,” the school asked its students and alumni to develop a technology
policy that will determine whether to ban phones, allow them in a
limited way or leave the decision whether to disconnect to students.
Many students, alumni and teachers have asked Alden Smith, the
school’s director, to declare a ban. But the school has always held that
its students can be trusted to make good choices, he said. “We have to
figure out the balance between how to preserve the values we have,” Mr.
Smith said. “But I tend to think that adolescents, particularly the ones
we get here, when mentored, will rise to the occasion when trusted with
real responsibility.”
To make phone calls from the 300-acre campus, students must take
turns, using prepaid calling cards, at small phone closets in each
dormitory. At the recommendation of alumni, there is no Internet service
in the dorms, only in the academic building, and incoming students are
strongly discouraged from bringing DVDs or loading videos on their
laptops. (Even where there is Internet service, any online activity that
requires significant bandwidth — watching a video on YouTube, for
example — means a loss of signal to others because the town’s fair
access policy limits bandwidth to the school.)
At first, Andy Sharp, 17, from nearby Thetford Academy, missed
participating in his friends’ fantasy football league online. But after
most of a semester at the school, he said, he uses his laptop only for
doing homework and checking Facebook occasionally. “I didn’t think that
was going to happen to me, but it did,” he said. “Your focus shifts to
things that are in front of you.”
That is not to say that students cut themselves off from the outside
world altogether. Many were keeping up with new music, including Julia
Christensen, a 16-year-old from the Lakeside School in Seattle. She
planned to wake up before 7 a.m. recently to download Taylor Swift’s new
album before the morning Internet rush hour. But that was an exception.
“Here, if you spent a lot of time on your computer, people would
think that’s lame,” said Calais Larson, 17, of Phillips Exeter Academy,
who believes that cellphones should not be used on campus.
Students say they are ambivalent about returning to a world where they can be reached at any moment.
After a short break last month, several students said it was a relief
when they returned and were not expected to respond immediately to text
messages or did not have to worry about which party to attend. As they
split firewood and dug potatoes, the discussion was instead about
heading to Garden Hill to watch the stars, or reading Frost and hiking
in the New England countryside.
The school says students have agreed on a draft policy: students will
hand over their phones to the faculty when they arrive and will get
them back on off-campus trips; they can also choose to get them back a
month into the semester.
Mr. Smith and other longtime teachers say their goal is not to
encourage their students to live without technology, but to make them
think more carefully about their use of it.
“The idea is not to be going back to a time where things were
better,” Mr. Smith said, “but where the richness of each day is defined
by the food you eat, the company you keep, the work you do.”
****
Some of the News Fit to Print
WHAT KIND OF SUCCESS DOES ‘CHARACTER’ PREDICT?
IQ, the time-honored predictor of school success, has a new rival:
“character.” As described by Paul Tough, who initially popularized these
ideas in a
New York Times Magazine article last year,
character consists of a set of traits: self-control, zest, social
intelligence, gratitude, optimism, curiosity, and, most especially,
grit. If teachers devote themselves to enhancing these qualities, Tough
writes in more detail in his new book,
How Children Succeed, Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character,
students will have an improved shot at success. The thesis seems to
have legs: One flagship charter-management organization, KIPP (the
Knowledge Is Power Program), has embraced it; others will undoubtedly
follow. While the benefits of such qualities as self-control and grit
are not to be dismissed, three cautionary concerns should be factored
into any serious consideration of this new movement. The commentary is
in
Education Week.
ABOUT K-12
BETTER TEACHER-CANDIDATE MENTORING TARGETED
With state and national policymakers eyeing ways to improve teacher
preparation, a handful of education programs are becoming more
intentional about how such “cooperating” teachers—as they’re known in
the lingo of teacher preparation¬—are selected and trained. That
interest could grow as programs wrestle with the finer points of how to
transform student-teaching from a haphazard, sometimes hastily tacked-on
experience to the central component of preparation. The quandary of
cooperating teachers is “an issue of qualifications, training, and
support in the context of a strong partnership with a district,” said
James G. Cibulka, the president of the Washington-based National Council
for Accreditation of Teacher Education, which commissioned a 2010
report calling for programs to significantly expand and improve their
student-teaching. The article is in
Education Week.
HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION RATES BY STATE
The Department of Education has released a first-ever list detailing
state-by-state four-year high school graduation rates. The data reflect
figures from the 2010-2011 academic year, the first year for which all
states used a common, more rigorous measure. Iowa had the highest
graduation rate at 88%. The data also show significant graduation rate
gaps among student demographic groups. The article is from the
Huffington Post.
NEW TESTS COMING TO UTAH SCHOOLS
The Criterion Referenced Tests most Utah students take will soon be
replaced with a new $39 million testing system designed to better
pinpoint students' needs, state education officials announced. A
committee has decided to accept a bid from the American Institutes for
Research to build a new computer-adaptive assessment system, which will
test students on the Common Core standards. The article is in the
Salt Lake Tribune.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
COMPRESSED ONLINE COURSES DRAW MORE SCRUTINY
The Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of
Colleges and Schools is investigating two more institutions over their
use of accelerated courses, The Chronicle has learned. The commission
sent letters this month to Cloud County Community College, in Kansas,
and Adams State University, in Colorado, requiring those institutions to
prepare detailed reports describing their shortened-format courses,
which have helped many athletes stay eligible for sports. Earlier this
month, the commission announced an investigation into Western Oklahoma
State College, which was the focus of a
Chronicle of Higher Education
article detailing how thousands of college athletes have used its
10-day classes to help maintain NCAA eligibility. The American
Association of Community Colleges has also raised concerns. The post is
from
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Players blog.
COMMUNITY COLLEGE TAKES ON FOR-PROFITS
Ozarks Technical Community College is naming names in a marketing
campaign that touts how its tuition stacks up against for-profits. A TV
commercial the college unveiled last week compares the $3,300 annual
cost of tuition, fees, books and supplies at Ozarks to $32,000 at Bryan
College, a small Christian for-profit, $18,000 at ITT Tech and roughly
$14,000 at Everest College and Vatterott College. A pugnacious ad from a
community college is rare. The sector generally avoids duking it out
directly with for-profits, which have much bigger marketing budgets. But
that may change as community colleges, like the rest of higher
education, seek to demonstrate return on investment to an increasingly
skeptical public. The article is in
Inside Higher Ed.
ABOUT K-12
COLLEGE READINESS EXAM TO REPLACE GRAD TEST
Ohio will drop its high-school graduation test and replace it with a
tougher college-readiness exam and a series of end-of-course tests,
state officials announced. The new assessments will gauge whether
students are prepared for college or ready for careers, benchmarks that
the Ohio Graduation Test doesn't measure. The article is in the
Columbus Dispatch.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
FINANCE POLICY AND BROAD-ACCESS PUBLIC COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES: OPPORTUNITIES TO SPUR INCREASES IN STUDENT SUCCESS
Finance policy plays an important role in supporting success in higher
education. Most state finance policies have been developed primarily to
address selective research and flagship universities, not broad-access
schools. A new policy brief from the Center for Education Policy
Analysis at Stanford University identifies fiscal policies that provide
disincentives for broad-access schools to improve student success, as
well as opportunities to encourage improved performance at these schools
going forward.
THE UNEVEN VALUE OF ACADEMIC CREDIT
The tight hold American colleges and universities have on academic
credit—what it is worth and who awards it—is about to undergo a well
overdue stress test. Two announcements in as many months have the
potential to perhaps finally better define the value of credits in
higher education. The post is from
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Next blog.
SKILLS DON’T PAY THE BILLS
Nearly six million factory jobs, almost a third of the entire
manufacturing industry, have disappeared since 2000. And while many of
these jobs were lost to competition with low-wage countries, even more
vanished because of computer-driven machinery that can do the work of
10, or in some cases, 100 workers. Those jobs are not coming back, but
many believe that the industry’s future (and, to some extent, the future
of the American economy) lies in training a new generation for highly
skilled manufacturing jobs — the ones that require people who know how
to run the computer that runs the machine. The article was in
The New York Times Magazine.
COLLEGE GRADS TAKING LOW PAYING JOBS
Throughout California, 260,000 recent college grads under the age of 30
are working on the front lines of food service and retail industries
where historically those jobs have gone to workers without a degree.
"We're seeing graduates in humanities and some of the arts fields
struggling because perhaps what their degree is in doesn't translate
well to the global current economy," said Ian Moats, a staffing
consultant. Currently, the healthcare and technology sectors are
growing. The article is in the
Santa Barbara Key.
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