Long before the era of Zoom arrived during the coronavirus pandemic, kids stuck within the four walls of their homes had to keep learning. And they succeeded thanks to telephone teaching βteach-a-phoneβ.
As the pandemic rages on, all schools in the US are closed, and students are struggling to continue their education at home. In Long Beach, California, a group of high school students pioneered the ingenious use of popular technology to restore communication with their teachers.
The year is 1919, the mentioned pandemic is unfolding due to the so-called. "". And a popular technology is telephone communication. Although by that time the legacy of Alexander Graham Bell was already 40 years old [the inventor of the telephone today is considered an Italian / approx. transl.], he is still gradually changing the world. At that time, only half of households with an average income had a telephone, according to Claude Fisher's book America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940. The use of the telephone for students to study was such an innovative idea that it was even written about in the newspapers.
However, this example did not immediately launch a wave of remote learning using new technologies. Many telephone switches during the Spanish flu pandemic could not cope with user requests, and even Please refrain from calling except in emergencies. Perhaps this is why the Long Beach experiment has not been widely adopted. The US managed to avoid a comparable health crisis and widespread school closures for more than a hundred years, until the coronavirus hit.
However, even without events such as the Spanish flu, many children in the early and mid-twentieth century did not go to school due to illness. We, reaping the benefits of many medical discoveries and breakthroughs, forget how many deadly diseases were an everyday reality for our parents and grandparents. In 1952, due to local outbreaks the number of cases in the United States approached 58. That year, under the leadership of one of the first polio vaccines was developed.
Two decades after the outbreak of the Spanish flu, the phone has once again proven itself as a tool for remote learning. And this time, with consequences.
For many years, schools taught homebound children the old fashioned way. They brought learning to their homes with the help of itinerant teachers. However, this approach was expensive and did not scale well. There were too many students for too few teachers. In rural areas, the mere transition of a teacher from house to house ate up most of the working time. The advantage for students was that they spent only an hour or two a week on lessons.
AT&T and the local phone companies advertised their phone-training services, talking about them to potential users and earning a good reputation.
In 1939, the Iowa Department of Education spearheaded a pilot program that put teachers on the phone instead of driving. It all started in the city of Newton, most famous for its production of Maytag kitchen appliances. According to a 1955 article by William Dutton in the Saturday Evening Post, two sick studentsβTanya Ryder, a 9-year-old girl with arthritis, and Betty Jean Carnan, a 16-year-old girl recovering from surgeryβbegan learning by telephone. The system, built by volunteers from a local phone company, was the first example of what would later be called the teach-a-phone, school-to-home phone, or simply "magic box."
Soon others joined Tanya and Betty. In 1939, Dorothy Rose Cave of Marcus, Iowa, picked up , a rare bone infection that bedridden her for years. Doctors only discovered in the 1940s that it could be successfully cured. . An article in the Sioux City Journal from 1942 recalled how the local telephone company ran seven kilometers of telephone cable to connect her farm to a nearby school. She used the phone not only for studying, but also for listening to concerts given by her classmates and their basketball games.
By 1946, 83 Iowa students were being taught by telephone, and the idea had spread to other states. In 1942, for example, Frank Huetner of Bloomer, Wisconsin, was paralyzed when the school bus he was riding from a debate overturned. After spending 100 days in the hospital, and then catching up with his classmates in all subjects, he came across an article about the teach-a-phone program in Iowa. His parents convinced the local college to install all the necessary equipment. Huetner became famous as the first person to successfully graduate from college, and later from law school, while studying by phone.
By 1953, at least 43 states had adopted distance learning technology. After approving the student, they usually took on almost the entire cost of telephone services. In 1960, it ranged from $13 to $25 per month, which in 2020 corresponds to prices from $113 to $218. Although sometimes organizations like Elks and United Cerebral Palsy helped pay the bills.
Improving teach-a-phone technology
Just as today's schools have embraced Zoom, a service originally designed for businesses, so the very first teach-a-phone systems were simply re-engineered from a recent office intercom called Flash-A-Call. However, users have experienced noise during calls between schools and students' homes. Moreover, as Dutton wrote in the Saturday Evening Post, "arithmetic lessons were sometimes interrupted by the voices of housewives calling to order groceries."
Technical problems like these inspired the Bell System and Executone, a commercial communications equipment company, to create special equipment for school-home communications. As a result, students sitting at home (and sometimes in the hospital) received a gadget that resembled a desk radio, with a button that they could press to talk. It connected via a dedicated telephone line to another device in the classroom, which received the voices of the teacher and students and transmitted them to the remote child. School transmitters were made portable and were usually carried from class to class by student volunteers during the school day.
Still, outside noise created problems. "Slow, high-pitched sounds are amplified, and the sound of a pencil breaking near the telephone in the classroom echoes in Ruffin's room like a gun shot," Blaine Freeland wrote in the Cedar Rapids Gazette in 1948 about Ned Ruffin, a 16-year-old Iowa resident suffering from .
Schools gained experience with teach-a-phone technology and learned its strengths and weaknesses. One could easily learn the native language with just one voice. Mathematics was more difficult to convey - some things had to be written on the board. But schools have struggled to implement telephonic learning. In 1948, the Iowa newspaper Ottumwa Daily Courier reported that a local student, Martha Jean Meyer, who suffered from rheumatic fever, had a microscope delivered to her home so that she could study biology.
As a result, schools usually decided to remotely teach children no younger than the fourth grade. It was believed that smaller children simply did not have enough perseverance - this was faced by all kindergarten teachers who tried to remotely manage 5-year-old children this year. At the same time, the arrival of teachers at home was not completely abandoned; this has proven to be a useful support tool, especially for exams that are difficult to administer remotely.
The most important thing in the teach-a-phone story was the effectiveness of this technology. A 1961 study found that 98% of students who used this technology succeeded in their exams, compared with the national average of only 85% of students. The authors of the report found that the students who called the school were more interested in their studies and had more time to study than their healthier and more carefree classmates.
Together with the benefits of education, this system was also useful in restoring the camaraderie that was not available to children who stayed at home due to illness. βTelephone communication with the school gives locked-up students a sense of community,β Norris Millington wrote in 1959 in Family Weekly. "The student's room opens up to the whole world, contact with which does not end with the end of classes." The following year, an article was published about a student from Newkirk, Oklahoma, named Gene Richards, who was suffering from kidney disease. He used to turn on his teach-a-phone half an hour before class to chat with his school friends.
Big cities
Although the teach-a-phone system was born in the countryside, it ended up being useful in more densely populated areas as well. Some distance learning programs in metropolitan areas have gone beyond simply connecting locked-up children to traditional classrooms. They began to conduct fully virtual classes in which each student participated remotely. In 1964, there were 15 tele-learning centers in Los Angeles, each serving 15-20 students. Teachers used auto-dial phones and dialed pupils' homes on dedicated unidirectional lines. The students participated in the training using hands-free devices, which cost about $7,5/month to rent.
Schools also interspersed telephone classes with other distance learning technologies. In New York City, students listened to what they called "high school live" on the radio and then discussed it over the phone. There was also a more interesting system developed at GTE called "board by wire". The teacher could take notes with an electronic pen on a tablet, and the results were transmitted by wire to remote television screens. This technology was not only a lifesaver for those trapped within four walls, but also promised to βlink the poorest classrooms with the most brilliant teachers miles away,β as the AP wrote admiringly in 1966. However, the technology has not been widely adopted β and neither have newer distance learning technologies that have not lived up to their advertised promises.
Distance learning systems were so useful that they continued to exist in the 1980s and 1990s in the same way that they lived in previous decades. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the most famous user of these technologies was , a "bubble boy" from Houston whose severe combined immunodeficiency kept him from leaving the containment room set up in his home. He had a teach-a-phone that he used to call nearby schools, which gave him a touch of normalcy until he died in 1984 at the age of 12.
As the 18st century approaches, a new technical element is finally changing remote learning forever: video transmission. At first, videoconferencing training required equipment as low as $000 and ran over IDSN, an early form of broadband that existed when most homes and schools connected over . The Talia Seidman Foundation, founded by the parents of a girl who died of brain cancer at age seven and a half, has begun promoting the technology and covering the cost of equipment so that schools can teach students unable to attend school in person.
Today, services such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet, and laptops with video cameras have made remote video training much more accessible. For tens of millions of students forced to study at home by the coronavirus, these technologies are becoming indispensable. Moreover, this idea still has great potential for development. Some schools are already using telepresence robots, such as those from VGo. These remotely controlled devices on wheels with built-in cameras and video screens can serve as the eyes and ears of a student unable to come in person. Unlike the old teach-a-phone boxes, telepresence robots can interact with classmates and move around rooms at will, even joining a choir or going on camping trips with the class.
But, despite all their advantages, which have taken these robots far from the telephone systems of the 80th century, they still remain, in fact, video phones on wheels. They give students who stay at home the opportunity to learn and assimilate, help children overcome difficult problems, alleviate the loneliness of their difficult situation. For Iowans, among the first to use the teach-a-phone system more than XNUMX years ago, such robots would seem like science fiction, but at the same time they would appreciate their potential and usefulness.
Source: habr.com