If you can't beat them, join them, and then beat them.

TPCK, technological pedagogical content knowledge, may be the best building block for a culture since communism, but the fact of the matter is that the amount of possible positive outcomes warrants placing it in the curriculum of running schools. I have yet to find an educator that denies they chose the field of education to work for the students. If that is the case as educators we must play to their wants, as well as their needs. The traditional, conservative, whatever-you-wanna-call-it way of teaching is undoubtedly successful when addressing a traditional, conservative, whatever-you-wanna-call-it way student. However, students differ in social, racial, political, religious, economical backgrounds, and because of that, an educator must prepare his/herself to give each student the least restrictive learning environment, to achieve the best results. According to "Extending the Conversation: New Technologies, New Literacies, and New English Studies" research proves that "...new technologies (and the literacy they engender) are change agents whose affects are so pervasive they influence or thinking and ideologies..." If this is the case affecting future generations of students, fighting the change will prove fruitless. The only way to combat an institution is to spread as much information as possible. Use the TPCK that you have attained and apply it to a traditional, conservative, whatever-you-wanna-call-it way curriculum that your district promotes. If the methods have positive results it will be obvious to the stubborn that change is not a synonym for negative. That being said I am currently teaching a scripted curriculum in the Pittsburgh Public School District. In my next unit, I plan on requesting to use a film biography of Bob Marley to supplement understanding for the book The Color of Water. Undoubtedly, a biography of Bob Marley will contain content involving the illegal drug of marijuana. For a person to analyze the biography with a negative connotation, without watching it, due to the presence of marijuana is ignorant of history and by doing so turns his/her back on providing students material containing the potential to spark interest in themes  attempting to be taught. To conclude, I leave you with these questions...Does a loss of value in printed-text, as a teaching tool, mean a loss of value in the standard for educating? If students can absorb the content of education earlier, faster, and more efficient through using TPCK, would it not then benefit our society to allow the new generations to improve present, flawed practices and ideas. How will we solve current problems if we continue to employ failing practices?