With two maternity leaves, a military leave and a retirement, our Social Studies department faced a human resources Armageddon this September. We’re two weeks into the school year and the four brandy-new replacement teachers are feverishly burrowing into their new careers (and doing quite well, thank you very much). Five years ago, five teachers in the department brought a collective 95 years teaching experience to their classrooms. Today, the total aggregate classroom experience of five teachers is not more than a year and a half. Of all of the implications brought by such a dramatic demographic shift, there is one thing that stands out. These new teachers will grow much faster than the predecessors.
Of all of the challenges facing new teachers, one of the most dreaded is figuring out what to do tomorrow, something one of my mentors called “lonely, lesson-plan-less nights. I distinctly remember hopeless efforts
in dark hours, trying to breathe some creativity into an Erie Canal lesson for a Geography class in my first year of teaching. I envied the veterans, who had built a such an extensive inventory of lessons that they did not have to plan much anymore, they only had to schedule. One teacher even had a collection of “observation” lessons, available at an unannounced moment’s notice and categorized to match the reform du jour, guaranteed to impress the administration with a show class. In those days of the early Internet and Windows95, it took from three to five years for a teacher to feel comfortable enough to relax a couple nights a week. Assuming of course, that they taught the same prep, course changes reset the clock to zero.
Today’s teachers collect more course material and lesson plans faster than their predecessors because they work exclusively in a digital environment. They have access to an exponentially larger library of materials. Not just books, but every painting, picture, movie, music and recording ever made. And they can save the material faster; a point and clicker on the Internet will build an inventory faster than a scissor cut and copier with newspapers and magazines. New teachers store their lesson plans, assignment sheets, notes, articles, images, audio and video clips on their own machines, school’s drives and in “the cloud”.
Not only that, new teachers have their materials tagged, organized and cataloged, and therefore more 
easily accessible than anything their ancestor teachers ever had. Our retiree left six packed file cabinets in his wake, overflowing with materials for a half dozen courses. Although the folders were labeled and organized, only he knew what he had and where he had it. It is non-transferable until we review it folder by folder, scanning and storing the good stuff, organizing it by course and storing it on our shared drive.
Technology has cut the “material-experience” curve of new teachers from five years to perhaps two.
Why isn’t this enough to convince the ten year teachers to abandon their manilla and paper for flash and silicon?