Watching some football yesterday (go Packers!), I became frustrated with my cable company. Every few minutes the picture would go pixel on me. That’s not big deal as I could still make out what was happening. What annoyed me most was losing the audio. It was just a second or two, but losing even a few seconds of the sportscaster effected my understanding of what was going on.
This brought to mind a sobering statistic from an article written by the Technical Committee on Architectural Acoustics of the Acoustical Society of America that said kids in today’s classroom do not hear up to 25% of what is being taught. If this stat is true, 15 minutes out of every hour of instruction may not be registering with our kids. Knock out 25% of content from any subject matter and you’re going to have poor comprehension and academic performance. Listen……. this can be fixed in a few minutes! A simple classroom audio system like Lightspeed’s REDCAT instantly allows every student to hear every word clearly. Teachers, God bless ‘em, are doing their very best. They can be executing top end pedagogy with primo lesson plans, but if they cannot be heard over the ambient noise prevalent in today’s interactive classrooms…… they will have limited success. We talk about doing whatever we can to help our students succeed, but in order to do so we must first help our teachers succeed. We must give teachers the tools needed to be effective. A classroom sound field systems is a simple solution that assures all students hear 100% of the instruction. It’s time to consider a teacher’s mic as a basic component to 21st century classrooms.
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