Jim Bradshaw: Before AI, Holy Cross nuns brought technology to school

There’s a big debate going on over using Artificial Intelligence in the classroom that I’m not sure I fully understand (along with a whole lot of other stuff like that).

When I was a kid, the only artificial intelligence in our classroom came from the notes that one of my classmates stuffed into his sock before a big test.

Today our kids and grandkids are routinely using devices that were the stuff of science fiction back then, but the idea of using technology as a teaching tool appears to have come to south Louisiana earlier than I’d imagined.

They were using an “electronic classroom” in Gueydan in the 1950s.

The Abbeville Meridional described the high tech class set up for first-graders by the Grey Nuns of the Holy Cross at St. Philomena School:

“The tape-teaching method uses a two-way communication system, tape recordings, and other electronic devices to individualize the process of learning.”

Students used headphones “to follow the recorded instructions which supplement the material which has been presented … by the teacher.”

The system was developed several years earlier by Benedictine Sister Marie Theresa, who “visited in Gueydan to personally inspect the new set-up and assist in the first day of classes when pupils tried out their headsets for the first time.”

Sister St. Simon, the first-grade teacher in Gueydan, and several other teachers from the Diocese of Lafayette spent most of their summer learning how to use the machines and materials.

Tape teaching was also being introduced to sixth-graders at Our Lady of Fatima and eighth-graders at Cathedral Elementary in Lafayette, as well as to high school classes at DeLaSalle Normal, the Christian Brothers novitiate in Lafayette.

“The new method of teaching had received nation-wide acclaim because of the excellent progress made by pupils participating in it,” according to the Meridional.

It provided for “the simultaneous playing of three different lessons and the channeling of one or the other of these lessons to any combination of pupils.”
Monsignor Ignatius A. Martin, who was for many years superintendent of Catholic schools in the diocese, said the tape-teaching method gave “promise of accelerating
learning to a considerable degree.”

The whole thing was paid for with a grant from the Ford Foundation for the Advancement of Learning, which also funded another program that Sister St. Simon was involved in.

The second one was called the Thinking Curriculum Project “to study and analyze the process of thinking of first and second graders” and to develop a curriculum “to stimulate [their learning] to the highest level possible.”

Some of Sister St. Simon’s pupils were among the 500 chosen nationwide to participate in the study.

I probably would not have been chosen for that project if I’d been in her class, or would have contributed little to it if I had.

It’s been a long time since I was in the first or second grade, but I’m pretty sure my thinking processes during those years were mostly concerned with lunch, recess, and a little blonde girl named Mercedes.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.