Long before the Zoom era hit during the coronavirus pandemic, children trapped within the four walls of their homes had to keep learning. And they succeeded thanks to the teach-a-phone training by phone.
As the pandemic rages, all schools in the United States are closed and students struggle to continue their homeschooling. In Long Beach, California, a group of high school students pioneered the clever use of popular technology to reconnect with their teachers.
The year is 1919, the mentioned pandemic is unfolding due to the so-called. " Spanish flu ". 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 the Italian Antonio Meucci/ approx. transl.], he is still gradually changing the world. At that time, only half of the households with an income in the middle area had a telephone, according to Claude Fisher's book America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940. The use of the phone by the students for teaching was such an innovative idea that it was even written about in the newspapers.
However, this example did not immediately launch a wave of distance learning using new technologies. Many telephone exchanges during the Spanish flu pandemic did not cope with user requests, and even posted announcements asking them to withhold calls except in emergencies. Perhaps because of this, the Long Beach experiment was not widely adopted. The United States managed to avoid a comparable health crisis and widespread school closures for over a century before the coronavirus hit.
However, even without events such as the Spanish flu, many children in the early to mid-20th century did not go to school due to illness. We, reaping the fruits of many medical discoveries and breakthroughs, forget how many fatal diseases were an everyday reality for our parents and grandparents. In 1952, due to local outbreaks of poliomyelitis, the number of cases in the United States approached 58,000. That year, under the leadership of Jonas Salk , 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 remote learning tool. And this time - with consequences.
For many years, schools taught home-bound children the old fashioned way. They brought their studies to their homes with the help of itinerant teachers. However, this approach was expensive and did not scale well. Too few teachers had too many students. In rural areas, the teacher's transition from home to home alone consumed most of the working time. The plus for the students was that they spent only an hour or two a week on lessons.
AT&T and local telephone companies promoted over the phone training services to potential users and earned a good reputation.
In 1939, the Iowa Department of Education spearheaded a pilot program that began putting teachers on telephones instead of driving. It all began in Newton, best known for its Maytag kitchen appliances. According to a 1955 article by William Dutton in the Saturday Evening Post, two sick students - Tanya Ryder, a 9-year-old girl with arthritis, and Betty Jean Carnan, a 16-year-old girl recovering from surgery - began studying over the phone. The system, built by volunteers from a local telephone company, was the first example of what would later be called the teach-a-phone, school-to-home phone, or simply the "magic box."
Soon, others joined Tanya and Betty. In 1939, Dorothy Rose Cave of Marcus, Iowa, contracted osteomyelitis, a rare bone infection that kept her bedridden for years. It wasn't until the 1940s that doctors discovered that it could be successfully treated with penicillin . A 1942 Sioux City Journal article recalled how a local telephone company stretched seven kilometers of telephone cable to connect its farm to a nearby school. She used the phone not only for teaching, but also for listening to concerts given by her classmates and their basketball games.
By 1946, 83 Iowa students were telephoning, and the idea had spread to other states. For example, in 1942, 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. Huettner rose to fame as the first person to successfully graduate from college and then law school, studying over the phone.
By 1953, at least 43 states had adopted distance learning technology. After approving a student, they usually bore almost the entire cost of the telephone service. 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 schools today adopted Zoom, a service that was originally developed for commercial enterprises, the very first teach-a-phone systems were simply redesigned from newly emerging office intercoms called Flash-A-Call. However, users encountered noises during conversations between schools and student homes. Moreover, as Dutton wrote in the Saturday Evening Post, "arithmetic lessons were sometimes interrupted by the voices of housewives calling to place an order for groceries."
These technical challenges inspired Bell System and the commercial communications equipment company Executone to create specialized communications equipment between schools and homes. As a result, students at home (and sometimes in the hospital) received a gadget resembling a desktop radio with a button that they could press to talk. He used a dedicated telephone line to connect to another device in the classroom that picked up the voices of the teacher and students and transmitted them to the distant child. School transmitters were made portable and were usually carried from class to class by student volunteers during the school day.
And all the same, extraneous noise created problems. “Low-pitched high-frequency sounds are amplified, and the sound of a broken pencil in Ruffin's classroom near the telephone is a gunfire in Ruffin’s room,” Blaine Freeland wrote in the Cedar Rapids Gazette in 1948 about Ned Ruffin, a 16-year-old Iowa with acute rheumatic fever. fever .
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. It was more difficult to transfer mathematics - some things had to be written on the blackboard. But schools have tried their best to implement telephone training. In 1948, the Iowa newspaper Ottumwa Daily Courier wrote that a local student, Martha Jean Meyer, who suffers from rheumatic fever, had been specially brought home with a microscope so that she could study biology.
As a result, schools usually decided to teach remotely children no younger than fourth grade. It was believed that the smaller children simply did not have enough perseverance - all kindergarten teachers who tried to remotely control 5-year-old children this year faced this. At the same time, they did not completely refuse to come home from teachers; this has proven to be a useful auxiliary tool, especially for examinations that are difficult to conduct 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 successfully passed the exams, while the national average was only 85% of students. The authors of the report decided that the students who called the school were more interested in learning and had more time to study than their healthier and more carefree classmates.
Coupled with the benefits of education, this system was also useful in restoring the companionship that was not available to children who were left at home due to illness. “The telephone connection to the school gives the locked-in students a sense of community,” wrote Norris Millington 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 Newkirk, Oklahoma student named Gene Richards who suffered from kidney disease. He was used to turning on his teach-a-phone half an hour before class to chat with his high school friends.
Big cities
Although the teach-a-phone system was born in the countryside, it has ended up being useful in more densely populated areas. Some distance learning programs in metropolitan areas have gone beyond simply connecting children locked at home in 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 autodialer telephones and dialed students' homes using dedicated unidirectional lines. The students participated in the training using speakerphones, the rent of which cost about $ 7.5 / month.
The schools also interspersed telephone classes with other distance learning technologies. In New York, students listened to what they called "High School Live," and then discussed what they heard over the phone. There was also a more interesting system developed by GTE, which was called "board by wire". The teacher could take notes with an electronic pen on a tablet, and the results were transmitted over wires to remote television screens. This technology was not only a salvation for people trapped in four walls, but also promised to "connect the poorest classes with the most brilliant teachers, who are many miles away," as AP wrote admiringly in 1966. However, the technology has not become widespread - as have the newer distance learning technologies that have fallen short of their touted promises.
Distance learning systems were so useful that they continued to exist in the 1980s and 1990s as they did in previous decades. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the most famous user of these technologies was David Vetter , the “bubble boy” from Houston, whose severe combined immunodeficiency prevented him from leaving the protective room in his home. He had a teach-a-phone that he used to call nearby schools, which gave his life a touch of normality until he died in 1984 at the age of 12.
With the 21st century approaching, a new technical element has finally changed distance learning forever: video transmission. Initially, educational video conferencing required $ 18,000 or more and operated over IDSN, one of the earliest forms of broadband communications that existed when most homes and schools were dial-up . The Talia Seidman Foundation, founded by the parents of a girl who died of brain cancer at the age of seven and a half, has begun promoting the technology and covering the cost of equipment so that schools can educate students who cannot 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 affordable. For tens of millions of students who have been forced by the coronavirus to study at home, these technologies are becoming irreplaceable. Moreover, this idea still has great potential for development. Some schools are already using robots for remote presence, for example, from VGo. These remotely controllable, wheeled devices with built-in cameras and video screens can serve as the eyes and ears of a student who is unable to come in person. Unlike the old teach-a-phone boxes, telepresence robots can interact with classmates and circle the rooms at will, up to participating in a choir or on hikes with the class.
But, despite all their advantages, which have taken these robots far from the telephone systems of the 20th century, they still remain, in fact, video telephones on wheels. They give the students staying at home the opportunity to learn and assimilate, help children overcome difficult problems, alleviating the loneliness of their difficult situation. For Iowans, who were among the first to use teach-a-phone more than 80 years ago, such robots would seem like science fiction, but at the same time they would appreciate their potential and benefits.