Jordan starts off by sharing an exciting community update: she was awarded a grant to place screen-free activity stations in town from the Morton Community Foundation. Jordan is preparing to celebrate National Children’s Book Week and Screen-Free Week on May 9th by organizing a local outdoor event in Morton. Helen is excited for summer after accepting a teaching position at the local community college. She will be working with high school students in the TRIO Upward Bound program. We then discuss ancestry, preserving memories and documenting the important (and the everyday) moments in our lives. We ponder what we hope to pass down to our future generations. Helen shares ideas from Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know and Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, two novels that explore how we document the present moment and question what happens to that documentation in the future. Helen also brings pieces of her dissertation into the discussion, including the history of the personal camera and how documenting famiy life has changed over time. Jordan then divulges the total number of photos and videos currently on her phone…it’s a lot. We try to reckon with how to preserve memories while also being present in the moment. We end by putting a request out for Joey Fatone to join our podcast.

Find Helen on Substack at ⁠⁠⁠Resonances⁠⁠⁠.

Join Jordan in ⁠⁠reConnect Morton⁠⁠⁠⁠ through Four Norms.

This week we are excited to a share a conversation with an expert in elementary school teaching: Mrs. Deb Gangstad aka Jordan’s first grade teacher at College Wood Elementary. With all of the changes that have happened (and are happening) to education, it is important to share the stories of educators who have been in the field for many years and can share their wisdom, expertise, and insights. For 28 years, Deb Gangstad was an elementary school teacher in the Carmel Clay school district in Carmel, Indiana. She shares with us how education policies may change over the years, but it is important to follow what you know is best for students and learning. We talk about how the introduction of comuters and devices into education have greatly impacted things like handwriting and developing social skills. Deb shares how her journey to education began at around age 5 when her dad (Eric Clark, also a teacher) would bring home pieces of broken chalk from his classroom. We talk about the value of play, the need for recess, and the importance of knowing what students’ needs are. We discuss the difficulties of parenting (and grandparenting) in this tech-filled world. We close with memories of a first grade end-of-the-year play Jordan still thinks about!

Find Helen on Substack at ⁠⁠Resonances⁠⁠.

Join Jordan in ⁠reConnect Morton⁠⁠⁠ through Four Norms.

We spend our episode focused on a recently published article by Natasha Singer in the New York Times, “Chromebook Remorse: Tech Backlash at Schools Extends Beyond Phones.” Before diving in, we recap our recent spring break and Easter travel adventures. And it turns out Helen’s daughter is no fan of the Easter Bunny. The article features a public middle school principal in Kansas, Mrs. Inge Esping, and her decision to eliminate her school’s 1:1 student Chromebook program this school year. We talk through the challenges teachers who have spent years using certain tech platforms to build their class materials may face and what it really looks like to renorm technology use in the classroom. We talk through ways districts can be more tech-intentional by sharing a resource developed by ScreenStrong: “Seven Core Values for Using Technology in the Classroom.” One thing Helen loved from the article was how reducing tech in the classroom led to students finding “old school” ways of being ornery, like sticking paper darts in the ceiling! We end the episode with Jordan sharing a 3rd grade, hand-written essay she recently discovered about her vision for Americas’s future.

Find Helen on Substack at ⁠Resonances⁠.

Join Jordan in reConnect Morton⁠⁠ through Four Norms ⁠.

Follow along with the episode by reading the NYT article on Chromebook remorse, reviewing the ScreenStrong Seven Core Values document and the Granville County Public Schools playbook, checking out the Phone Free Schools Report, catching up with our local news on tech use in a nearby school, and fact-checking Jordan on students' off-task behavior statistics :)

And then once you've done all that...give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify! Who doesn't love homework!?