Old Dog, New Tricks

One of the very inspiring aspects of living in a less economically developed country is the incredible ingenuity of people who have so few resources. Daily I am wonderstruck by the Burmese people who, with so little, can do so much.

A couple of friends and I were recently dropped off with our bikes on a remote road in the delta. Fifty kilometers of hot, hilly landscape lay between us and the Bay of Bengal. As our families sped off in air-conditioned vehicles, we climbed in our saddles and began our slog to the sea. Seconds after the cars disappeared from sight Mark’s rear tire blew out with such force that the tire bead was ripped away from the sidewall. With no spare tube or tire, and a few small patches pitifully inadequate to close the two-inch gash in Mark’s tube, we stood on the side of the road feeling helpless.

As luck would have it, just down the road stood a ramshackle group of bamboo huts and shelters; one of which had an old bicycle tire hanging from its roof. In Burma this is how bicycle repair men advertise their services. Mark popped the wheel off his bike and handed it to a young man sitting on the swept-dirt floor. Around him were the tools of his trade: some scraps of old inner tube, a small bowl of grimey water, a pair of rusty, old scissors, a steel rod flattened at one end (tire iron) and a mangled tube of rubber cement.

Within ten minutes the tube was fixed and reinflated, but the tire wouldn’t stay on the rim because of the ripped-out bead. By now several men stood around discussing what was to be done with the tire. For the next half an hour several creative strategies were tried to no avail. Finally, the young repair man disappeared into an adjacent hut and reemerged followed by a white-haired man. The growing crowd of men parted and the old man squatted in front of the wheel, and for several minutes stared at tire bulging off the rim. Without a word he stood up and returned to his hut. He was back moments later with a stout needle and heavy thread. An old spoke was bent, hammered and sharped into an awl, and the old tire master (who we suspect was also the village surgeon and tailor) cross-stitched the tired back to health. Two dollars later (an exhorbitant but justifiable price) we were on our way heading toward the sea in the heat of the day.

Where I come from we tend to solve such problems by throwing money at them because we have so much and are encouraged to buy more. The old tire would have been tossed in the trash, and for a new tire I would have shelled out more than our Burmese tire surgeon makes in a month. For all our wealth and technology, if such ‘resourcefulness’ were an Olympic event, I know we’d never make it to the podium with the Burmese, the Ethiopians, or the Pakistanis.

My students and I are fortunate to work with wonderful technology to support our learning. But I want my students to understand what the Burmese know so well- that their ‘headware’ is more important than their hardware, and that being resourceful is more critical than having resources. As I see it, my job is to keep my students from ending up stranded on the side of the road with a flat tire and so many places they just can’t go.

As I was drifting through cyber space the other day I came across this startling claim from APScience: Your mobile phone has more computing power than all of NASA in 1969. I have no idea whether this is true or not, but it is quite fantastic. A quick search yielded some answers, but for me the power of this statement isn’t so much it’s truth but the imagination it inspires.

Many of my students have mobiles which means on any given day I’ve got a dozen or more NASAs in my classroom. Now, my students are motivated and smart but we ain’t sendin’ a man to the moon anytime soon! For one thing our admin strictly prohibits students from bringing rocket fuel on campus. More importantly, my students tend to be more interested in ‘launching birds into pigs’ with their mobiles than putting anything on the moon. But the potential is there and it’s exciting. With a little innovation and guidance, imagine what a bunch of feisty sixth graders armed with smart phones could do!

Underlying this statement about mobiles and computing power is an important idea: in 1969 NASA was obviously so much more than it’s computers. Mission Control was a room full of brilliant people with a singular purpose, hundreds focused on one, unprecedented achievement- to land a man on the moon. NASA was not so much about computing, it was about collaborating. I’m not going to pretend that my students are of NASA caliber (yet), but we’re also not trying to send someone to prance about on the moon. We are, in our own way, quite capable of achieving great things. With clear goals and a couple of smart phones we can put our heads and hearts together and work magic.

I’ll let NASA create the moon walks and Apple design the phones. For my students I’ll provide what I can so they can think creatively, feel deeply and, like NASA, work together to make great things happen.