Technology Director
/What’s Hot, What’s Not
“You’d expect a twenty-two-hundred-dollar laptop to have USB ports.” I inspect the new machine with my eyes but also with my fingertips, like they’ll find something my eyes missed. “Where do I put a flash drive?”
“New Macs have USB-C ports. You might need some kind of adapter,” my husband says.
Great. Our wedding pictures, essays I wrote in college, and a couple hundred pages of curriculum I created are temporarily inaccessible.
I spin the sleek MacBook around slowly, one, two, three times, still feeling along the edges.
“There’s no place to stick a DVD,” I say.
When the Internet fails, DVDs are useful, but with fewer and fewer devices to play them, I wonder if they’re worth the shelf space.
I think we should get some kind of periodic technology briefing—even something like the what’s hot, what’s not lists that were in the teen magazines I read growing up. What’s Hot: USB-C ports and streaming. What’s Not: USB ports and DVDs. Well, I guess we don’t say USB anymore. Now we call it a USB-A, which confuses me because I’ve been calling it a USB for years, and no one ever interrupted me to say, “I think you mean USB-A.” It’s like how Star Wars was just Star Wars until other installments popped up, and then you had to call it Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.
My previous laptop, a PC, was gasping for air after two months of me teaching English classes through video conferencing. When shelter in place began during the COVID-19 pandemic, my personal laptop usage went from maybe thirty minutes per day, to about eight hours per day. My computer gave ample warning that it couldn’t keep up. The fan inside the device whirred furiously, speeding up, then slowing down, getting louder, then softer. The screen flickered. Halfway through class, the grid of student faces would freeze, and I’d be left repeating, “Hello? Can you guys hear me? Hello?” I needed a high-powered machine for work.
The new laptop starts automatically, but I’m unable to use it fresh out of the box. The computer wants to get to know me before we take things to the next level. One thing it wants to know is my voice. I’m directed to say, “Hey Siri” and I follow the cue. I continue, repeating several more lines. “Hey Siri, open the documents folder. Hey Siri, show my downloads. Hey Siri, what does the rest of my day look like?”
Dang it! I didn’t want to give my voice, but I followed the commands in big font at the top of the screen. If I’d looked for the smaller, fainter font, I would have seen the “Set up ‘Hey Siri’ later” option. There is no option that says, “I choose not to set this up” or simply “No.”
Then it wants my fingerprints. I’m directed to press my index finger to a key that lights up in the top right corner of the keyboard. This time I find the “Set up touch ID later” option and click it. Again, there is no option that says, ‘I choose not to set this up’ or simply ‘No.’ I’m able to bypass the fingerprint command, but the truth is I gave up my fingerprint to an iPhone years ago. I didn’t think fast enough when it told me to place my finger on the home button so it could take my print.
When I finish accidentally dishing out personal information and side-stepping commands, I tell my husband, “It asked for everything but a blood sample.” I’m joking. Kind of. I can envision a future where computers will prompt users to get a finger prick so the device can store your blood type as an additional security measure. Or maybe one day we’ll be asked to take a retina scan, a kind of Mission: Impossible-level clearance for computer access. You can never be too safe.
“Is it a touch screen?” My husband leans across me to tap the glassy surface with his index finger. His touch has no effect but to leave a smudge. Soon my computer will host many Is-this-a-touchscreen? fingerprints.
I remember my first laptop. I don’t think it knew anything about me, and I was happy with the arrangement. It didn’t try to store my credit card information and it definitely didn’t ask for my voice or fingerprints. It didn’t even prompt me to set a password. I just opened it and started using it no questions asked.
Technology has gotten bossy. It doesn’t ask if you want to supply personal information to set up certain features: it directs you to set them up. If you look hard enough, you can usually find an option that says something like, “I’ll do this later,” but consent is implied in that the option is to do it “later” versus not at all.
Technology Director
“Now, which one of you is Stefanie?” the man asks, looking from person to person.
“That’s me.” I raise my hand like I’m a student responding to roll-call instead of a teacher.
The man is middle-aged and acts like someone auditioning for the role of Salesman: extra cheese. His tone indicates he’s trying to sell me something, which confuses me because my small private school has already bought his company’s product, a subscription to an online portal where teachers log grades for students and parents to see.
The man shakes my hand and says that my employers, who are out of town today, have
picked me to make all decisions for setting up our new grade portal. I am equal parts flattered and stupefied. On one hand, I am happy they see me as a trustworthy and competent teacher, but on the other hand, it was poor judgement to make me the shot caller on technology matters. I am, after all, the woman who sets reminders on her iPhone by penning messages on flamboyantly-colored Post-its and sticking them to the back of her phone. When I pull my phone out of my purse, it looks like a tropical bird with neon feathers that has wandered off course and nested in my leaf-green Dooney and Bourke. My husband loves to share this anecdote about his technology-resistant wife with his friends and colleagues.
It’s not that I’m some ding bat who doesn’t know how to set a reminder. I just choose not to. I remember things better when I write them out by hand. And I don’t just remember the content of the message, I remember the color of ink I used, if I wrote in print or cursive, and if I doodled a flower, a heart, or a swirl.
The other teachers wander back to their classrooms, and I’m left in our school’s cafeteria with the man playing the role of salesman. To help set up the platform, he’s brought his technology-guru colleague, a young woman in a short blue dress. They tell me that if our school needs additional help after today, her rate daily rate for tech support is in the thousands.
The salesman begins going through options and asking for input, and my mind is already wandering. I wasn’t a fan of our school’s previous platform. Most teachers at our school have accounts of logging a grade, and then going back and realizing the grade’s not there anymore. This is why I keep an additional secret gradebook, a reliable spreadsheet. Surprisingly few parents and students even check the grades we post online. The whole thing is a big inconvenience if you ask me.
“Hang on just one second,” I say.
I walk out of the cafeteria and around the corner to the science teacher’s room. She’s the one who always took a special interest in our previous grade portal, carefully exploring all its capabilities. I pop my head in.
“Hey, I know they put me in charge, but they clearly should have picked you. Would you come sit in on this meeting?”
She does. And she is interested and takes over discussing options with the man playing the salesman and the woman whose time costs a lot of money.
At home I tell my husband about my new role. He laughs. “They made you technology director.”
Sent to Utah
As a teacher, I’m hearing about more and more about students getting “sent to Utah.” This is where families with disposable income find help for their technology-addicted teens. Diagnosis: Internet addiction. Treatment: Camping. Parents pay a lot of money and their kids spend extended time in the great outdoors, highly supervised, without TV, without the Internet, without a cell phone.
I remember my first cell phone. I got it when I started to drive. It was a way to call for help if I got lost or had a wreck. When I pulled into my high school’s parking lot each morning, I’d stash my little blue flip phone in the glove compartment beside other things I didn’t need very often, like my auto insurance card and ice scraper. Once time my friend got caught talking on her phone in our AP English class. Our teacher walked over, took the phone, placed it to her ear and asked, “Who is this?” My friend’s mom identified herself on the other end, and our teacher informed her that it was class time and her daughter shouldn’t be on the phone. My friend’s behavior embarrassed me.
Imagine my surprise when I returned to my alma mater as a substitute teacher and saw a phone on every student’s desk. Most of the phones were housed in ostentatious cases. There were clunky rubbery ones shaped like animals or cartoon characters. There were brightly colored ones bedazzled with rhinestones. There was no attempt to hide the devices. On the contrary—they were as eye-catching as possible. I’d walk into a class, and the students would be seated, heads tilted down, index fingers swiping, up, down, left, right. This was how the day got started, with me coaxing the students to pocket their devices and lift their heads for instruction.
By the time I was a full-fledged high school teacher, technological distractions were a hefty drain on my time and energy. I tried to combat the phone problem, but it was like that Wac-A-Mole game: as soon as you deal with one phone another pops up, then another, then another, and you spend more time whacking moles than teaching lessons. I drew a line with students charging phones in my classroom. School policy stated that cell phones were not to be used (or seen) in class, and I reasoned that if students were needing a charge mid school day, they were certainly using their phones too much. I employed an armful of $6 Target floor lamps to guard the classroom’s outlets. The lighting from the lamps gave off a more peaceful vibe than the overhead florescent lights, but more importantly, it alerted me to students attempting to use the outlets to charge their phones. If a light went out during class, I knew someone had unplugged a lamp to charge a phone, and I was on it in a flash. The kids complained, but I stuck to my guns.
The students’ downward glances were habitual. A quick look. A peek. A glance. An unconscious reach. A tap of the home button. Just to see. Any messages?
I remember a good student in my Pre-AP sophomore English class. He’d slide his phone out of his pocket for a glimpse of the screen and slide it right back in his pocket.
“Max,” I’d say, “remember, we’re not using phones in class.”
“Sorry.”
A minute later he’d slip his phone out to check the screen.
“Max?”
“Oh, dang it!” he’d say. “I didn’t even realize I was doing it!”
I believed him. It was a natural impulse, like blinking, like breathing.
One year I had a colleague who responded to the phone situation in a very different manner than I did. She bought one of those closet racks with little cubbies for shoes and fashioned it into a homemade phone charging station. Each pocket that was meant for shoes held a charging phone instead. Now her whole class could charge their phones simultaneously. There’s a saying that goes If you can’t beat them, join them. Her philosophy was If you can’t beat them, assist them.
I attended a professional development session one time where the speaker was excited about phones in the classroom. He said, “You younger teachers see that phone in the kid’s hand and think, This is a gold mine.” His comment was directed to me, the youngest teacher in the room. I always get lumped into that group that’s supposed to bow down to technology. He talked about using phones in the classroom for research and such, but he didn’t offer advice on how to monitor phone usage in the classroom.
Utilizing technology is a box on a teacher’s performance review. It’s assumed that whatever you’re teaching, it’ll be better if you incorporate technology. In an English class we read ancient plays like Antigone and epic poems like Beowulf. For some reason it’s important that we teach the most archaic of works through the most modern of means.
While kids are “sent to Utah” for technology addiction, teachers are asked, “How are you using technology in the classroom?” We’re not asked if we’ve had success using technology in our lessons. We’re not asked if we’ve seen improvement in scores due to more technology. We’re only asked how we’re using it. There is no “I’ll do this later” option, and there is certainly no option that says, “I choose not to do this” or simply “No.”
Social Malaise
In high school, I often spent weekends at a friend’s house. One or two other girls were usually with us. Our weekends were the epitome of laziness. We took over the living room, every inch of the large L-shaped couch draped with teen girls in pajamas. My friend’s mom brought us platters of sandwiches while we watched one romantic comedy after another. Her house was like my house in that we had only one computer, a family computer. Hers was in the corner of her living room. Now and then she’d walk over to the computer, saying she had to “update” people about which movie we were watching. Weird. I went back to staring at the TV. She was the first person I knew to get on a computer to “update” people on what we were doing. I couldn’t be bothered to ask her how or why she was doing that. But there was a question mark lurking in that corner.
By the time I was living in a college dorm, all of my classmates had their own computers—sometimes a desktop but usually a laptop. On my hall, it was customary to walk into someone’s room unannounced and start a conversation. During my first few months in the dorm, there was a lot of levity. Girls would try to scare each other for laughs. One day I walked into someone’s room and started talking like I always did. My friend was facing an open laptop on her desk. Her room was dark, and I could only see her outline against the glow of her laptop. She gave brief responses to my talking points and never turned around to look at me.
Over the next few months, I noticed the same symptoms in my other friends. I’d go into a room to chat, and I’d receive short responses. My friends wouldn’t turn around. They kept their eyes fixed on their computers, the light from their laptops throwing shadows on the walls. This social malaise was spreading, chipping at the edges of my friendships. Hanging out was no longer an exercise in easy discourse, but something a little melancholy. It didn’t take long to discover the root of their malady because I was soon invited into it.
“You have to get Facebook,” my friend said. “How else am I going to share pictures with you?” I started paying attention to what was on their screens. Photos. Loads of photos. Here was the root of their illness: monitoring the pictures of themselves that had been posted. They zoomed in and out, picture by picture, standing guard against any unflattering images they might be tagged in. They dedicated hours a day to this endeavor. Zoom in, zoom out. Zoom in, zoom out.
I decided not to join. I didn’t want to spend my evenings hunkered down at my desk in the glow of my laptop. I didn’t want to be the person who didn’t turn around when someone came to talk to me.
Though I was adamant about not getting Facebook and not having my pictures float around the Internet, I did eventually have to deal with others creating pages about me. I had sidestepped social media in college, but in my career as a teacher I wouldn’t entirely avoid it. One day I was standing outside my classroom, one foot kicked back on the brick wall, greeting my sophomore English students as they trickled into class. A student walked up to me. “I have something to show you,” she said. Out came her phone, and she tapped the screen a few times and then flipped the device around for me to see. There were pictures of me in my classroom. There I was behind my desk, head tilted down like I was looking for something. There I was again, at the front of the class, teaching. Around the pictures were comments where my students compared me to Taylor Swift. I’d recently cut bangs, and I always wore red lipstick. I guess if you were to take several steps backwards and squint your eyes to make me blurry, I might have had a hazy resemblance to the singer. My student insisted she did not make the page—she just wanted to show it to me. My mentor teacher from next door walked over, glanced at the page and told the student, “You need to let whoever made that know they could get expelled.” It was unnerving to learn about the spy activity going on in the classroom. Students were secretly taking pictures of me, posting them, and discussing them in a public space.
Motion Detected
My husband’s colleague invites us to his home for dinner one evening. We pull up to the curb outside his suburban two-story, and we’re stepping out of the car when we notice the host already standing outside the home, watching us. “My cameras detected movement on the street,” he says.
Inside, we find that the home is updated in almost every way, from the trendy gray walls, to the new furniture, to the modern angular shelves, to the lights that automatically brighten for us when we walk down a hall or into a room. When we’re seated in the living room, the host says he’ll give a demonstration. “Hey Google,” he says, “turn off living room lights.” Google responds,
“I’m sorry, that function has not been set up.” “Hey Google,” the host says, “turn off guest room lights.” Google responds, “I’m sorry, that function has not been set up.” Then he says simply, “Google, turn off lights” and while the lamp lights go out, the overhead light stays on, casting strange shadows on the host. “That’s the brain of the house,” he says, motioning to a device on the other side of the room. “Right now it’s showing pictures of the family.”
I’d noticed it when we came in. On the bar between the kitchen and living room is what appears to be a digital picture frame showing a carousel of family photos, but it’s really a brain that listens for commands and controls the cameras set up in and around the house. I hadn’t considered that there were more cameras than the one that had detected the movement from our car when we pulled up. If my husband and I had gone undetected and made it to the door, we would have been filmed by the doorbell camera, and a live feed of us would have gone straight to the host’s phone. I go through a checklist when I’m standing on someone’s doorstep. Straighten shirt. Check. Smooth hair. Check. Ensure fly is up. Check. How embarrassing to not realize someone is monitoring your nervous adjustments. I start to feel a little paranoid, and as I look around, I see cameras tucked away in corners.
Wi-Fi Available
I am often nostalgic about the past. I remember when people weren’t always looking down at a phone or a computer screen. I find myself seeking the treatment of the kids who are “sent to Utah.” I seek time without TV, without Internet, without a phone. I lean toward vacation destinations that make it difficult to plug in.
One year I picked a treehouse in the middle of the jungle in Costa Rica, a place with no address, only GPS coordinates. When our taxi driver dropped us off at base camp, a girl jogged to the Jeep my husband and I were stepping out of. She said, “You should make arrangements now to be picked up by your taxi driver. We don’t have a phone out here.” Excellent. My husband chatted with the driver in Spanish, making arrangements to be picked up in two days’ time. I was excited about being off the grid—only to find out that Wi-Fi was available at the treehouse community’s base camp.
I was also excited to go on a cruise with my husband for the first time together. I remembered that on my previous cruise several years prior, my family had decided that phone use wasn’t really applicable. I’d been on our cabin’s balcony, the salty breeze tangling my hair when my brother leaned over with his cell phone and asked, “What does international roaming mean?” I looked at him with wide eyes and said, “Turn it off, turn it off!” Due to his costly error, my family decided to turn off our phones and tuck them away for the rest of the trip. So when my husband and I went on our cruise together, I’d assumed we’d also turn our phones off and stash them in the room’s safe, along with our passports and wallets, things we wouldn’t need when we were roaming the deck of the ship, or sipping cocktails by the pool. But things had changed. When we first stepped aboard, we were greeted by signs about wi-fi plans for purchase. My husband bought a wi-fi plan the first day.
The Internet reaches deep into Costa Rican jungles and stretches out to the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. Technology evolves rapidly. Even when I think I know something about it, I usually find that my knowledge is dated and that what I once knew about technology is no longer the case. We live in a world that wants more technology, faster, even if it means that we need places that specialize in not having it so we can rehabilitate.
By Stefanie Fair-King