Connection and Disconnection in the Digital Age

[Things influencing this post:
David Warlick's K12Online Keynote
Tom Hoffman's -- On Modernism
The words of the students of SLA]

For a bunch of years at Beacon, I taught a senior English class called "Connection and Disconnection in the 20th Century." It was a semester-long, reading intensive class that really was a survey of some of what I thought the major literary themes of the modernist and post-modernist movement were and are. The class was reasonably analog, and despite that, some of my favorite moments of classroom teaching happened there.

This is one of the intro letters from the class:

To the students of Connection and Disconnection in 20th Century Literature:

The desire for connection, to our fellow humans, to a community, to a country, to a God, could be considered a basic human need. In the 20th century, as many of the traditional bonds changed at a speed never seen before, that sense of connection changed or was lost. Much of the literature of the modernist and post-modern, from Eliot and Joyce to Don DeLillo and Jeanette Winterson, has struggled with this theme, and, it is my belief, that we can learn a great about our society and ourselves through an examination of these ideas. On a personal note, many of these texts are my favorites, and many have special meaning for me.

This course is a great deal of reading. It is roughly the same number of books that you would read in a college course. I expect you to keep up on the reading, even when it’s really difficult (and much of it is.) The heart and soul of this course is discussion, and therefore, the onus is on you to read, think, and come to class ready to talk about what you read, even if most of what you have to say is to ask questions. We will, on average, read through three books every four weeks. Also, you do need to get these books – not the poetry -- on your own. These books are all available at the Beacon library and the local Barnes and Noble stores.

Syllabus:

• T. S. Eliot Poetry -- "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Wasteland."
  
• James Joyce – Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  
• Wallace Stevens Poetry -- including "Sunday Morning" and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
  
• Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own
  
• Nathaniel West – Day of the Locust
  
• Saul Bellow – Seize the Day
  
• Allen Ginsberg – “Howl”
  
• Jack Kerouac – On the Road
  
• Robert Pirsig – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
  
• Thomas Pynchon – The Crying of Lot 49
  
• Kurt Vonnegut – Cat’s Cradle
  
• Don Delillo – White Noise
  
• Gloria Naylor – Linden Hills
  
• Jeanette Winterson – Written on the Body
  

This class will be a little different from other Beacon English classes you've taken so far in that the vast majority of the writing is analytical literary analysis. To help prepare for your papers, and to help you think about our texts, you will write a one to two page short analytical piece every week. This is a somewhat loose assignment, in that I expect you to do some interesting work in these short pieces, but I don’t have a specific “assignment” that I want you to fulfill. As for the papers, you will be doing four papers for this class this semester, three long essays and one major research paper that must contain critical commentary. I know no one looks forward to writing papers, but I hope you view these papers as a chance for you really to explore books and topics that are of interest to you. In addition, we will have the class forum available to continue discussion, throw out ideas, ask for opinions and generally keep the class going outside of class hours.

And that’s as good a place to sum up this letter. It is my hope that this class can be rigorous fun. There’s a lot of work, both reading and writing, but there is also the chance to explore some of the canonical texts of the last century, taking a look at some of the fundamental philosophical questions of the last 100 years. You may find that many of the questions we encounter over the next few months are questions you have asked of yourself. It’s my hope that we find that our four hours together every week is a time of powerful, exciting discussion that we all want to extend beyond the walls of our classroom. I will be posting our assignments on the Beacon Portal, and as always, I’m always on email at clehmann@beaconschool.org. Thanks, and I hope you are as excited about the class as I am.

(In retrospect, yes, I would love to redo this class with all those short pieces and the major pieces as blog entries. I remember toying with the ideas then, but I didn't have a specific audience for the pieces in mind, and at that point, it had been my experience that student blogging without an audience was not that productive. We did use the class forum extensively, and I had many a midnight IM chat with kids about the texts... but I digress.)

I was thinking about this class and its many conversations today after watching David Warlick's K12Online keynote, after spending two days at the T+L conference in Nashville, and after continuing to reflect on the words of the SLA kids when they spoke to a world-wide group of educators. And I think about our rush -- and I certainly implicate myself in this -- to create our global networks. I look forward to my every-five-minute twitter blast. And yes, many of our colleagues are right when they say that our kids are connected all the time. And yes, we all now check our emails when we're out to dinner with friends, or we call our friends from the baseball game to tell them that we're there. And there is much that is good about all of that. Indeed, I wouldn't give it up.

But, I think of the conversations of those classes with my seniors. I think of all the texts we read of people disconnected from the world around them. I think of Eliot's words in "The Wasteland" and Eliot's lament that the modern world, in its rush, in its industrial revolution, in its teeming mass of humanity, had lost its connection to that which makes us human, had lost its connection to that which ties us to the earth and each other.

And I think of what we've lost in our generation. Yes, the students are texting on their cell phones as they exit the bus, but they don't necessarily notice the sunset. And yes, David Warlick's son could carry on a conversation with friends while walking the campus of his new college, but over the two days he would spend with parents before embarking on a new chapter in his life, he was distracted from the company of his parents, and we don't even notice that that might be strange or wrong. And in our classrooms, in our meetngs, in our lives, we have given up the now, the immediacy of our experiences to record it, write it, share it, all the while pulling our attention away from what we do.

And I think of all of us, trying to sum up our worlds in 140 character tweets, joking -- but living -- the idea that "If it didn't tweet, it didn't happen."

And I think of our SLA kids, all with their facebook and myspace and AIM accounts, but all -- to a person -- when asked about what makes SLA special, talking about the immediacy of their relationships. And I think of the richness of the connections that exist. And I think of my old classroom, when we talked about these issues, no laptops, just a wonderful text, some great questions and a community of people debating our small 'a' answers.

I love our tools, and when we use them to enrich our connections, to deepen them in ways that matter (like the midnight IM conversation about the meaning of "The Wasteland"), they are powerful and deep and rich. I love that I spend my downtime in my life listening to people and talking to people, rather than surfing for something entertaining and mindless on TV.

But I also remember that there is nothing gained without something lost. And I miss the now. I want Jakob and Theo to be able to live enough in their moments so that they notice the details that we miss when we walk to work, headphones on, cell phone out, text-messages at the ready. Jakob is three, and when we talk or drive, he notices everything. He sees things I miss, whether it's a broken taillight of a car to the outfit that someone is wearing. He lives in his moment fully, and I miss my ability to do that.

As teachers, we learn the value of wait time in our classes, we learn -- and it's one of the hardest things I had to learn -- to value silence in our classes, to be o.k. with it. And yet, in our own lives, we are rushing to fill every moment of silence as if it were something to be feared. And, as we rush to embrace connectedness, as we rush to fill our classes with the world, we need to also teach our kids to appreciate and embrace the moments they live in -- even the quiet moments. We need to help them live in the now -- and we may need to help ourselves remember it as well.

The literature of the 20th century was filled with writers trying to make sense of a changing world, of a world where every traditional societal institution and norm was challenged and threatened and changed. As we talk about the education of the 21st century, let's learn from their struggle, and help our students embrace new and old, connectedness and the now, and let us always try to look at our own immediate worlds -- our present and our past -- with the awe and wonder with which we look at the future.