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.)

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.

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?!

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.

A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.

God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.

God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.

Good people go to heaven when they die.

Why is this such a problem?  Rod points it out as an aside in this lengthy entry that’s actually about another topic:

This is why I’m always going on about the curse of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Whatever it is, it’s not authentic Christianity, not by the historical and doctrinal standards defining orthodox (small-o) Christian belief. If we Christians declare that tradition is not binding on us in any meaningful way, that we are free to believe about our faith whatever “works” for us, then we are theologically bankrupt. I find it easier in some ways to understand the atheist who believes it’s all nonsense than the self-described Christian who takes what he wants but ignores the rest, especially the hard stuff. To be clear, I don’t believe that only saints are authentically Christian. I sin. We all sin. I struggle to understand many of the teachings of the faith. But I don’t decide, on my own authority, that I don’t have to believe this thing or that thing, because it’s too difficult, or it doesn’t “work” for me. I am not a good Christian, but I can make that judgment because I have a clear standard of what a good Christian is — a standard that exists independent of my own preferences and moods.

Amen and amen. MTD is the Oprah of religions (this is part of what I loathe about Oprah.  She is NOT harmless; she advocates for a worldview in which the self is the measure of all things.)

Now, midway through Year 8 of teaching in classrooms at an extremely conservative Christian institution, I am shocked by how much of this mindset has crept into the thoughts and actions of my students.  Here are the biggest fallacies I’ve observed:

1. Effort = achievement.  Over and over, students argue that they deserve an A on a paper because they worked really hard.  Once, after I explained that part of the grade was creativity, several students turned in papers written in colored ink and plastered with stickers.  When I expressed disbelief, they countered that they were trying to be “creative.”  This was one moment in which I despaired of ever being a good teacher.
2. Prayer instead of effort.  We begin every class with prayer, and I am often touched by the number of students who remember the sick, the poor, the unborn and all who struggle.  But I also notice a growing number of students who pray almost as a substitute for their own efforts.  For instance, one of my students a number of years ago asked prayer for her grades at every single class, but almost never turned her work in on time.  Just about every student has prayed desperately for snow at some point in his life, but many of the students I encounter really seem to believe prayer is some sort of magic charm.
3. Prayer as a shopping list.  In seven and a half years in the classroom, the only prayer of thanksgiving I’ve ever heard is after the birth of a family member — maybe two or three a year.  Thinking back to my own experience at a Christian school growing up, the requests always outumbered the thanksgivings (we are humans, after all, selfish by nature, and God knows I understand this!) but there were things for which we were grateful: time with friends, deliverance from sickness, and occasionally even good grades. (Aside: Most of my students are Catholic and refer to prayer requests as “intentions,” so it could be that that term is specifically intercessory, and that’s why they so seldom give thanks.  I’m not sure.)
4. Struggle is bad.  Maybe this is an unfair expectation, since I only really learned to enjoy the struggle of learning in college (see any entry about Gussow!) But I do seem to remember understanding, as I wrestled with Geometry proofs or oil painting, that I might just have to accept that this was too difficult for me to fully understand right now. My students just can’t understand how struggling could be a good thing.  In their view, the best kind of assignment is easily completed and makes them feel good afterward — completely devoid of struggle — and the worst kind of assignment is one that requires wrestling and may not even result in a good grade (see “effort = achievement” above.)  Similarly, they argue increasingly that Hester Prynne was unfairly ostracized for her sin and had every right to abandon her life in Boston for a new one in which she could live unapologetically with a new husband and their illegitimate child.  They know premarital sex is a sin, but they have seen so much of it that they can’t see why it should have repercussions on the rest of an otherwise-virtuous life: “She’s a good person.  Who cares if she did one bad thing, especially if it was with someone she really loved?”
5. Stress is struggle.  I’m sure I complained, as a teenager, about my stress level.  I’m also sure it was far less than what my students juggle: they are so overextended in so many areas that I could write a separate essay on the evils of extracurricular activities. What I want to point out here is the most common excuse for almost any academic infraction, which is “I’m so stressed out right now.” Somehow they have taken the work of learning and replaced it with activity — which becomes an excuse for not completing required tasks.
6. It’s all about me.  My friend Terry, a journalist and educator, has been an unbelievable source of support in this area: students love to write about themselves, to the extent that they expect to use first-person narrative in most academic papers.  I had one student argue that she didn’t see how I could take points off her paper, since it was based on her opinion: “How can my opinion be wrong?”  Yeah.  It’s come to that. Curiously, they appear simultaneously self-conscious about their opinions: if I had a dollar for every time I’ve crossed out “I believe,” “I think,” or “I feel,” I would be writing this entry from French Polynesia.  They want to state their opinions and make sure you thow they’re their opinions.

What does all this mean for teachers?  I’m not sure yet.  For now, I’m just aware (and wary) of this philosophy’s pervasiveness.