She needed to learn how to be present but not controlling, available but not directive. Naturally the fact of computer technology has been threatening to many schools. Some responded to the challenge by taking away all the computers and locking them up in a room. Imagine being a teacher when pencils were invented. You pass out pencils and watch as the children discover that pencils can do anything because a pencil is a symbol manipulating machine.
Children can write stories, do math, reflect on history.
Afraid you're no longer needed, you collect the pencils and lock them in a Pencil Lab, letting the children use them an hour a day. The rest of the time they write with rocks on slabs of broken concrete. In preparation for a speech for a school district in northern Illinois recently, I was told that the large corporations in which most of their students worked gave the district good grades in much of what they were teaching, but not in preparing young people for cooperative learning and cross- disciplinary teamwork. The structures of education, like the structures of work, are moving through a sea-change. Racial minorities, the canaries in the coal mine of society, die first.