In Other News

As an ironic follow-up to my last post, you might find it amusing to hear that I join Twitter about three months ago — and have discovered I actually like it.  I’m sure there’s just as much timewasting potential here as on other social media sites, but the brief format means you have to get right to the point, making it easier to sift through the chaff and ponder the kernels.

Besides using it to promote my freelance work (the real reason I joined: employer pressure) I’ve enjoyed reading links and thoughts from some of my favorite food writers, restaurants and friends.  I have no trouble leaving the site after 5 or 10 minutes, every few days, which I wish I could say about Front Porch Republic or The New York Times, where I enjoy teleological meditations and niche pieces: I get my bread-and-butter news weekly from, well, The Week, reading a little every evening from the old-fashioned paper copy that lives on my nightstand.

So, if 140-character blips are your thing, you can read mine at BaltimoreBites.  (It’s a joke.)  

(Sort of.)

Reach Out and Tweet Someone

Rarely have I read such an articulate, insightful and disturbing status report about the human race:

We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.

I see this behavior all the time, especially in adults. I hate it. Often I want to ask the person, “Why are you here? To interact with me, or to check your e-mail?”

And yet, I am certain I am guilty of the same behaviors. Being blessed with a husband who loves to drive, I often use my time in the car to communicate with clients and friends, sending messages and playing my single iPhone vice. In the guise of taking notes, I can read the news on my phone during boring meetings; I have noticed that I no longer sketch chair backs and light fixtures in the margins of my agendas, and honestly, I kind of miss that last connection to years spent with a pencil glued to my hand.

Later, the author continues:

We expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship. Always-on/always-on-you devices provide three powerful fantasies: that we will always be heard; that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and that we never have to be alone. Indeed our new devices have turned being alone into a problem that can be solved.

The great irony of this: I love being alone. In fact, most days I find myself working at the computer and thinking, “If I can just get this finished, I’ll go work in the garden / start dinner / read a book on the front porch.” And suddenly, after work with distractions all day it’s time for bed.  Or, more likely, way past time for bed. So, for me at least, it’s a matter of control. How can I keep these (innovative, useful, efficient) devices at a life-enhancing, and not a life-encompassing, level? I’d love to know how other people are handling it.

A Great Case for Homeschooling

David Walbert is awfully convincing:

Homeschooling is nearly always portrayed as a flight from something: bad influences, secular curriculum, bullying, drugs, violence, or simply a broken system. It’s made out to be merely an individual decision, defended (necessarily) by recourse to individual rights, a choice to exempt oneself from obligations to community for the good of one’s own children. But that seems to me exactly backwards. In fact, the homeschooling I’ve seen has produced children farless likely than the average American to see themselves as autonomous individuals, each the center of his or her own universe. Freed from the constraints of institutions, homeschooling is an opportunity to lay the foundations of community.

I’ve seen this among many of my friends who belong to homeschool groups, both formal and informal.  It’s nice to see kids making the most of unstructured time — which is really what childhood is supposed to be all about, remember?!

Grammarians Unite!

This guy is on a mission from God:

Mr. Vincent felt a burst of relief that soon gave way to trepidation after he caught sight of a sign. “No standing,” it read, “April to October.”

Mr. Vincent wondered what exactly that “to” meant, dithered for a bit, and then decided that it meant no parking until October began, which meant that that day, Oct. 2, was fair game. 

Of course he got a ticket anyway.  (Ask me sometime about the time a police office misinterpreted a sign when my Mom was trying to park in Wall Street.)  But he has appealed it twice and is looking to go on to the State Supreme Court:

“Every accepted printed dictionary supports my grammatical interpretation of the parking sign,” he wrote. “To: Up to but not including. Through: To and including.”

And, in a further display of logic-defying brazenness, the city has effectively proved him correct:

In the meantime, a new sign has appeared in the old one’s stead. “No Standing,” it reads, “April 1-Sept. 30.”

What a world we live in.  Mr. Vincent, I’m behind you all the way.

I Am Not a Teacher

Yesterday I realized that I had completely neglected this blog in the last frenzied month of church preparations for Pascha and my last-ever grad school project: an online portfolio with more hoops than an 18th-century petticoat. Sorry, everyone (all four of you!)  I’m still too brain-dead for new material, but you might enjoy this piece I wrote for the Philosophy of Education section of my portfolio.  I was feeling a little rebellious and not very philosophical when I wrote it, but hey, maybe that will make me stand out:

I am not a teacher. I am a B-grade comic, telling jokes that swoop over my audience’s head, waiting patiently for the punch line to sink in and sometimes stooping so low as to explain the irony for the momentary pleasure of their laughter.  Enduring mostly-good-natured heckling because really, any attention is better than no attention when you’re trying to drag a class by its recalcitrant heels through the murky depths of Shakespeare.  Ignoring Fred Jones’ advice and bopping till I drop, day after day: playing silly video clips, exposing my ignorance of pop culture and enduring barrages of personal questions (Did you ever get in trouble in school? What does your husband do?  Do you like our class the best?) in an effort to win their amusement and, by extension, their attention.

I am not a teacher; more often I am a grizzled police officer worn down by my own optimism.  Excuse me, ma’am?  Do you know how late that homework assignment is?  Well, I hate to do it, but I’m going to have to write you up.  Ten percent per day.  Oh, I know I’ll hear from your mother about this, but the law is the law, and I’m bound to protect and serve.  To protect you from mediocrity, from indolence and the deadly threat of just skating by – from yourselves and the society that seeks to possess you.  And to serve you with justice, the stomach-tightening justice of knowing you were wrong and the sweet elation of doing it right, on time, in spite of all the other responsibilities and commitments you had to fulfill last night and this morning.  I can sniff out a wandering eye during a test and an intimidating eyeroll during a group project, and both will incur my wrath.  Be fair.  Be kind.  Or else.

I am not a teacher: I am your secretary. I will post grades and administer make-up quizzes and attend required meetings even when they are hopelessly irrelevant.  I will fill out forms and make you fill out forms and file the forms against some unnamed future day of reckoning.  I will remind you two or three or sixteen times about which assignments are due; I will repeat myself even when I have sworn not to; I will keep track of who is in the bathroom and who is at the nurse’s and who just got diagnosed with a learning disability and needs to take her tests in Guidance, and who can’t take her test at all because she just whacked her head in the bathroom and feels dizzy, or left her books at home and – no, please, no tears – just can’t do it today, Mrs. Lowe, please? 

In fact, if anything I am a psychologist, drying the tears of self-discovery and double-crossing the more wily among you who won’t go down without a fight.  I can trick you into enjoying the act of revision.  I can guilt you into a grudging respect for the Dark Romantics.  I hear your prayers for one another and the whole world; I see your defeated faces when you’ve just failed a quiz; I understand your frustration with the SAT and your parents and global warming, all buttressed by rising estrogen levels.  We talk about whose fault it is when a student doesn’t know the answers, and sometimes it’s mine.  We close our eyes and imagine a long staircase, count down the steps to enter the office of your brain, open the right drawer and folder and spread out the impressions and notes and then walk back up, open our eyes and KNOW we are ready for the test.  We overcome shyness in front of a group, and your smile after you’ve haltingly spit out your four index cards about the literary devices in Bret Harte’s short story is more engulfing than a sumo wrestler’s hug (that would be a simile of sorts, but you don’t have to keep track since it was mine.)

I am not a teacher but a student myself: I learn from you every day what never to do (leave the room, even for half a minute) what to save for special days (food and the computer lab, but not together) and what to do over and over again (smile and be patient.)  I attend classes on my own even when not required, hoping that by learning French or Byzantine notation I can put myself back in your shoes long enough to understand you, and thus to reach you more fully.  I tell my own stories of late-night papers and last-minute projects, yawn-inducing professors and grades that I totally did not deserve: after my class, grad school will be a picnic.

I am not a teacher.  How could I be?  That would mean I am somehow worthy of the sweet (and sour) faces and clear (and cluttered) minds that fill the seats in front of me, day after day – that I can be trusted to lead them in the right way with loving firmness, to give them a (proverbial!) slap in the face when they need it and a cautious pat on the back when they don’t.  (Touching is not recommended, not for liability reasons but because it is guaranteed to bring tears, and then it’s back to the couch for a heart-to-heart instead of grading those vocab quizzes and making up a rubric for the next class’ presentation.) 

I am not a teacher, but I will do whatever I can to make sure you get an education.  And I will hope and pray that it was enough.