Online: the absence of transfiguration

It’s been odd, to say the least, teaching from home, laptop in hand, trying to do via Zoom and the web what is normally done in a classroom. These days, it is difficult, if not impossible, for me to attain a sense of the class—the students of the course—and students seem to make no effort to view me, their instructor, as a person who wants to improve them in some way. I seem to be a theoretical entity to them or perhaps a mere functionary or bureaucrat, an inessential conveyer of factoids.

That’s not good. 

In conversation—I haven’t actually seen her for two years!—Rebel Girl occasionally opines that our current crop of students are a special sort, namely, students who have never experienced the college classroom and who are, therefore, essentially the same unimproved creatures who populate today’s high schools with their notoriously low standards and evident indifference to discipline or excellence. RG isn’t quite so negative as I am, but that is the gist of her observation. 

(A few years ago, I briefly substituted for an instructor teaching at a local high school; I was stunned to find that the default state for these high schoolers is enthusiastic, incessant chatter. As soon as my presentation dipped into the less-than-forceful, these kids inevitably and immediately toggled to their default state, an abandonment of seriousness, an embrace of aimless, swirling "Tower of Babel" blather, a routine and familiar condition not easily overcome by any outside force.) 

Normally, such students, upon at long last experiencing the actual college classroom, are somehow osmotically influenced to shut-the-fuck up and get serious, at least to a degree, for that classroom is typically controlled by a forceful and earnest person who is in some sense an intellectual with a rich sense of the possibilities of learning and awareness and a conviction that what they have to offer is important. A good college instructor gets in his or her students' faces.

But that precious process doesn’t seem to be occurring these days, and the new normal among students is horrible. Unmodified and unimproved by the routine college classroom "get serious" transfiguration, many students instead further entrench in a dullard's concept of academic conscientiousness, focusing intently on an enumeration of the course “information” factoids and the identity of the specific subset of factoids that will appear on the next test or quiz. "What's the information for the test?" they ask, unashamedly. "What's the material?"

“Information”—I favor banning the concept from all things academic—is a horribly inadequate word for what many of us attempt to convey or teach in the college classroom, which is a rich and multi-faceted “form of life,” to use Wittgenstein’s phrase (for a way of being and living); it is a way of life, not a box of discrete knowledge nuggets, smallish verbal bytes that can be expressed as mottos or slogans and that can be embraced or rejected at whim. I deliberately come to the classroom manifestly interested in, and even excited about, all sorts of endeavors and phenomena about which most students seem clueless: the history of ideas and the relevance of that history, the constant need (among the rational) for justification, the imperfection of human thought and artifice, the particularity (not universality) of our world view, the unfairness and cruelties of the world, the glories (and horrors) of past thinkers and movements, the random emergence of genius, the awesome cosmos, the endless, imminent availability of catastrophe, and so on. My strategy, as a teacher, is to model someone enthusiastically working on a lifetime project of attainment of “understanding” about all this. I assume that at least some among my charges will catch the bug of intellectualism, that hunger for understanding about science, philosophy, and art. And, in my experience, I have always found that some do always catch that bug, not only because of me but because of the many instructors, in various fields, who endeavor to lay out that richer and wider conception of understanding and attainment to which students have simply not been exposed. Indeed, they have been counter-exposed, and often continue to be thus cloistered, even as they trudge indifferently through years of college instruction. 

It’s hard to model enthusiasm and wonderment over the possibilities of thinking and living even in the best of times; imagine attempting so fine a thing when one’s “online” audience seems to take every opportunity to behave badly (cheating via novel online tools) or simply to drop the ball: attending fewer and fewer lectures, failing ever to concentrate or to think, always aware that, at any moment, they can simply turn off that suspect "college" thing and tap back into familiar and comfortable uncritical mindlessness. As an instructor I think: better to be there, in the room immediately before them, looking straight into their eyes, demanding attention. It’s a subtle thing, this power we normally have over students and their attention, in the classroom. And that subtle thing is now largely absent. 

Don’t look now, but, in higher education, we’re going to hell in a hand basket. Let us return to the classroom asap (i.e., when safe)!

"I'd love t0 turn you on": remembering John Lennon (1967)

The Kinks, 1970: I've always loved Dave's harmony singing to Ray's lead. This song always makes me sad somehow. Love it.

1971: An uber-cool rocker. From the start, Ray saw our brave, new world and found much to object to

1968: Another great Kinks song: simple and wonderful about now and back then and the residue of our long-ago past

And it rocks