Customization to meet individual student needs; now there's an idea we should get our arms around.

Why should the teacher spend the bulk of the day in front of the class giving one lecture/lesson to the whole class at the same time? Ridiculous! But that's been the modus operandi of US teachers for over a century. Meanwhile, a number of kids in the class are bored because they already know what the teacher is attempting to teach, while in the same class others are overwhelmed because they never mastered the preceding lesson(s) from a week or even a month before. Talk about an insane way to run a classroom.

I individualized/customized the instruction for my kids for 33 years as a Massachusetts elementary classroom teacher. It's a method that worked well and parents and kids loved it. It was a meritocracy as opposed to the traditional whole group bureaucracy employed in most of our public schools. It was a bit of challenge to establish but once in place it proved to be as pragmatic as could be.

The major roadblock of incorporating technology into such a classroom? You guessed it - teacher unions. They want nothing to do with compromising the role of the teacher and certainly nothing to do with replacing a teacher in any form, least of all via a computer.