A Web TV interview I did about modern childhood and parenting.
Month: March 2009
Fast teachers
News of more acceleration in schools – only this time it’s the teachers who are being sped up. The British government today announced that in future “able candidates” can train to become teachers in just six months instead of the traditional one year.
The aim is to attract clever people who have lost their jobs in the economic downturn, especially in the financial sector. Said one government minister: “We know there are a lot of fantastic mathematicians, for example, who would have once perhaps gone into the City but now actually might be more interested in a career in teaching.”
But is this the right way to beef up the teaching ranks? I’m not so sure. Teaching is a hard job and the best teachers have a real vocation: that’s why they put up with low salaries, pushy parents and red tape.
Can we expect the same from those who colonize the classroom because they can no longer make absurdly inflated wages in the financial sector? And what happens when the economy rebounds and the City starts hiring again? How many of the fast-tracked teachers will choose to stay in the classroom?
Even if they do stay, I’m not convinced that halving the time devoted to teacher training is a good thing, even for bright candidates with lots of life experience. Just imagine if we did the same for surgeons, pilots or dentists. Learning a craft takes time. If anything, countries like Britain should be investing more energy in teacher training.
Just look at Finland. By any yardstick, it has one of most successful education systems in the world. Competition for teacher training is fierce in Finland, and those who make the cut study for five years before qualifying. Yes, five years.
Finnish teachers are so well trained that the nation holds them in high regard and trusts them to do well by its children. That means instead of dealing with endless inspections, assessments and bureaucracy, they can get down to the most important job of all: teaching.
I suppose the one benefit of speed-training teachers is that we’ll know very soon whether it works or not. My guess is that it proves to be another false economy.
Enough is enough
As recession bites, the excesses of the last boom look that much more absurd. Of course, many of the products sold during the largest spending spree the world has ever seen were designed to save time by speeding up even the most simple chores.
As a judge for the UK Landfill Prize, which compiles a Top Ten list of the most ridiculously unnecessary and wasteful products of the year, I saw some of these gadgets first hand. A few of the nominations were so silly I thought they were a made up. But they weren’t.
The grand winner was the motorized ice-cream cone. This is for people who are too lazy to turn the cone with their wrist. You stick out your tongue and the gadget swivels the ice-cream for you.
Third place went to the motorized fork. Yes, a fork that twirls the spaghetti for you.
One reader has just told me of another product that isn’t on the 2009 Landfill Prize list but would not have been out of place there. Give it up for: Selfy The Self-Making Bed. It was originally conceived for the infirm but its Italian inventor also hopes to sell to the able-bodied. Using a system of rails and runners, Selfy reportedly saves you 15 seconds a day. That’s a whole 105 seconds a week.
I think I’ll stick to Slow bed-making. Which means rearranging the pillows and pulling the duvet back up by hand.
Or not bothering to make the bed at all…
Are you listening?
The other day I gave a talk at Microsoft headquarters in Seattle. It was a bit like entering the belly of the beast. Technology companies worship at the altar of speed and their products are designed to help us do everything faster.
They also condition us to expect everything to happen at the click of a mouse.
A couple of hours before the talk, I was watching TV in my hotel room when a Microsoft ad came on. It featured animated drawings dancing on the screen while an ambitious CEO talked about how Microsoft software was a godsend for his company. I can’t remember the exact wording, but towards the end of the ad he said something like “…in business you have to do everything at the speed of light.”
Not a very Slow sentiment.
So did I get scalped and lynched during my lunchtime lecture at Microsoft HQ? Far from it. The Slow message seemed to strike a chord with the employees who came to hear me speak. The crowd hung around asking questions and sharing their own reflections even after the 90-minute session was over. This morning one of the organizers emailed to say that my visit has sparked a lot of discussion within the company.
I’m not surprised. Increasingly, it’s people inside the technology companies that are realizing there is too much speed in the system – and they’re looking for ways to slow down a little. Microsoft is no exception.
After my event, I spent some time hanging out with some of the company’s researchers. One of them was Eric Horvitz, who specializes in the interplay between technology and culture – how we use our gadgets and why, and how that use affects us.
Eric is overseeing some new research into what happens when people use laptops while attending public lectures. This particular brand of multitasking is now commonplace. At conferences, you see loads of people listening to speeches with their laptops open, reading and typing away in the eerie glow. Some are taking notes on the talk, but many are handling email, surfing the Web on unrelated topics or updating their Facebook pages. Or they’re tweeting.
Is there anything wrong with this? I think so. For a start, it’s just plain rude. When you attend a talk, the least you can do is give the speaker your full attention. Or at least give the impression that you are listening. Just think how irritating it is to share a dinner table with someone who constantly turns away to deal with incoming emails on a Blackberry. Or how important it is to look a person in the eye when you talk to them.
A public talk is different from a social gathering, of course, but don’t the basic rules of courtesy still apply?
You could argue that the world is changing and that people no longer expect to receive anyone’s full attention. But even if that is true – and I hope it’s not – then we should be worried about how that change affects our understanding of what is being said to us.
Back to that study at Microsoft HQ. Researchers are filming audiences during public talks and then asking them questions about the content. By plotting a time-line, they hope to work out how comprehension waxes and wanes during a speech and how those peaks and troughs correspond to laptop-users looking up and down from their screens.
My guess is that people absorb less when their attention turns to the computer – and that their general comprehension of the talk also suffers. I suppose that as a public speaker I would say that. Like anyone else who stands up on stage, I want to feel like I have the full and undivided attention of everyone in the room. But there is more at work here than my fragile ego.
What brain scan research is teaching us about multitasking is that it doesn’t work: that the human brain cannot process two streams of information at the same time, and that attempting to do so is a recipe for confusion, inefficiency and errors.
Of course, we don’t live in an ideal world where everyone can devote their full attention to everything they do. Some Microsoft employees argue that their workload makes it impossible to unplug for 90 minutes during the day. So they choose to multitask through the lunchtime lectures: giving speakers some of their attention rather than staying away and giving them none at all. Maybe they have a point. Maybe some Slow is better than none.
Either way, I’m looking forward to hearing the results of the Microsoft research and will report back here on the findings in due course.
In the meantime, if you’re reading this blog entry while attending a public talk, you might want to consider…
Jobs for the boys (and girls)
I’ve just returned from a speaking tour of the US and Canada (more on that to come), and someone at a talk/workshop I gave in Edmonton sent me this snippet from a blog. It’s amusing in a sardonic way. And maybe the punch line can be read in more ways than one.
Anyway, here it is:
If you think the coming nuclear winter will make the job market tough for employees, you need to hear about the job offer my daughter got recently.
The job has:
- $0 salary and no equity (you’re supposed to be compensated in experience)
- no benefits other than vacation and sick time – no insurance, for example
- no possibility of promotion or raise, ever
- no job description – just do what you’re told
- micromanaging boss asks about project status every hour
- strict hours, starting at 8:30AM sharp
- if you’re late even a few minutes, your boss sends you to her boss
- rigid workweek, but then you’re expected to work from home a ton
- open-desk seating, not even a cube, with a hard chair
- the work is boring and demeaning, like adding digits and copying text
- all your useless work gets thrown away
- if you want to use a computer, you can buy one or just scribble on paper
- no supplies room
- my daughter can’t drive so commute was complicated
- can’t even put the job on your resume until you work there for a decade
I wish this was a joke or I was making it up.
Having consulted with me, my daughter of course rejected this ridiculous offer and is now just working on side projects while looking for a better opportunity.
But millions of other 7-year olds accepted identical offers.