Inside the tent
Bill Griffith’s Zippy exposes a predicament teachers face. Distracted students sitting with their heads down, phone or no phone. Minds elsewhere, anticipating returning to messages on their phones and posting photos of themselves.
Sarah is sitting in the cafeteria with her friends. While eating lunch, she is texting; her mom, her brother, and Mary who’s sitting across from her. Mary and Imelda are taking selfies and and posting them while having a light conversation. Isabel is on WhatsApp texting her boyfriend. At the end of lunch, the four girlfriends go their separate ways.
How do we––all of us––find comfort in this disconnected world? How do we avoid temptation to take-out our phones? Can we simply take a walk in the park? Sit on a bench? Looking at what’s around us, we would feel less isolated, smiling at every opportunity. We come back to ourselves.
Classrooms can become sanctuaries for the young. Present-centered places where everyone is in the now, heads up looking at one another, voices heard, attention on the other. Classrooms may be the last vestige in the culture to recover the gift of human contact. And with the encroaching effects of AI, classrooms can nurture HI, human intelligence. If we don’t make this effort, we may not keep it.
Teachers show students how to discern what’s around them. How to look up at others when walking, give a smile, perhaps to say hello. They might take them to a nearby park without phones to practice, a taste that might awaken them.
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You who live with students every day know the irresistible pull of electronic devices, how they’ve become embedded. The personal computer, internet, smartphone, apps, keeping everyone digitally connected.
A classroom is an antidote, a sanctuary from the demands of digital life. You provide invitations to new horizons, new places, new thinking. You can bring your students into moments of engagement, excitement, magic perhaps, moments where they discover selves they’ve never met––not only others but themselves.
And in the workplace, the same principles apply.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forward” (Kierkegaard)
I write to bring ideas and methods from my life as a teacher in the latter half of the 20th century to help teachers and the public to “live forward” in this century. My latest book, Teacher in the Rye: Doing It My Way is available on Amazon. And I welcome comments here on my Blog or by email at frankthoms3@gmail.com.
