Half of new teachers quit within 5 years

This is not a post about new technology. It is about the one thing that technology can never replace: A good, caring teacher. As schools and districts have spent millions in hardware, software, testing, standards etc, we learn that many young teachers quit within five years because they are not well paid, nor appreciated.
I am told that Microsoft has a sign above their door at the education devision (where no teacher worked) which said something to the effect “Where a computer can do the job of a teacher, let it, because a teacher should be doing things a computer never can.”  This is the personal contact, the rapport, the caring, the relational stuff that defines the profession. Of course someone may have embellished David Thornburg’s famous quip: “Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer, deserves to be.” Computer guru Micahel Dell advises that “the most important thing is to focus on the teacher first.” He, Gates and Jobs have all seen technology as pivotly important to education. “ I used to think that technology could help education….” lamented Steve Jobs in a decade old Wired Interview, “But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.”

And yet technology really is so fundamentally important to the future of education. Read the Flat Earth. Check out the Conference Board of Canada’s empoyability skills.  The need for technology is paramount. But we need good, caring teachers first. Then we need to give them time to learn the technology that would enhance or better their education practice. Real time. Not an afterschool workshop when people are fried or half are coaching. Not a Saturday where they resent “giving up their weekend.” But time carved out with mentors who are both teachers and lovers of technology.