The Classroom with No Technology

During my observation to apply to College of Education, I did my shadowing at George Junior Republic. I chose this school because it was on the list of acceptable institutions deemed by SRU and it was very close. I did my whole twenty hours there and they could be some of the most important twenty hours of my young educational career. The classroom that I sat in on was a social studies course which covered all four grade levels. To put it into perspective Georges Junior has a number of students placed there for various disciplinary reasons. There are constantly students coming and going and leaving sometimes in the middle of a lesson. For a student to remain for a while unit is rare. My teacher that I was shadowing was an older man who was well into his fifties. He said that following a curriculum is hard and mostly this is what he does. "What he did" was hand out a worksheet for homework and show the video "NBA's Greatest Dunks" to which the students sat and watched for the remainder of the period. After sitting through five periods of that I wondered why he used no other technologies? Even more so I wondered why he didnt have a single poster on his wall. The more I think about it I suppose teaching a high school class really gets in the way of reading fishing magazines. I learned a lot from that class, particularly how to recognize when its time to hang 'em up.