Unraveling our increasing isolation
four books were directed to teachers and one recounting my encounters in Gorbachev’s Russia, the same theme resonates. Conversation Classrooms: A Profound Shift from Delivery of Information to Partnership is the title of my last book for teachers. Teacher in the Rye: Doing It My Way, just published, is a memoir of my life as a teacher.
I grew up wanting to connect. At four years old I stood naked at my family’s inn welcoming guests. At the waiters’ table in my fraternity, I mused openly nearly every day. When I stood in front of my students sitting at desks in rows in my first classroom, I moved up and down the aisles asking questions and responding. The following spring I reconfigured desks into a horseshoe to enable engagement, I sitting with them, they not seeing the backs of heads of their classmates.
Today, despite the plethora and pressure of digital devices and AI capturing our attention, I continue to advocate that the classroom is perhaps the only place where students can be without digital presence, where face-to-face conversations with eye contact, smells, gestures, movements, where social connection, fundamental to being human, is present.
We humans need each other. We do our best when we cooperate. The isolation of the pandemic and the present political climate create unhealthy divisions. Humanity depends on being together. Each of us can choose how we want to be. Together we thrive. Isolated, we suffer the consequences.
“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.
