Books and Reading, observations, paying attention, Teaching

How to Build a Better (Squirrel!!) Trap

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three children looking at a tablet computer

Fall semester has once again begun, and I’m still slogging along –no longer stuck, but moving– on my latest batch of as-yet unjoined essay rambles. And, once again, as sure as the cicadas that start up in July, begins the lament from my students in their first-of-the semester self-assessment papers:

“I used to read all the time, but I got too busy with [sports, extracurriculars, homework, …fill in the blank].”

“I used to write short stories when I was younger. I don’t know why I quit.”

And then comes the sentence that is most telling to me, perhaps answering the questions posed above as to why the change in reading and writing habits: “I guess it all happened when I got a [smartphone or laptop or gaming system].” Few are the students who say it out loud, but I think most of them –and most of us who are out of school– could say similar things.

I’d been meaning to for the last three semesters, but this time, I finally did it. I sent out an email opening up a conversation about why we’re all so prone to distraction and its evil sibling, procrastination. I’m curious to hear, in light of the recent pushback by some members of Gen Z against smartphones, just why they think this is. I don’t think many (any) of my students are in line to trade in their iPhones for flip phones, but I hear an increasing amount of commentary by my students’ generation about the ways that they feel a constant stream (scream?) of notifications is affecting not only their free time, but their mental health.

Toward the end of the email, I painted my students a picture, via statistics:

In 2007, the first iPhone was introduced. If they’re 18 today, they’d have been 2 years old.

In 2009, the Droid came out. They’d have been 4.

In 2010, the iPad was released. They’d have been 5.

I’m 50 years old as I write this. I didn’t own a smartphone until I was 38, and only bought an iPad in 2020 to help with online pandemic teaching.

These are the kids who grew up perhaps handed their parents’ iPad to keep them company during a long road trip. They might have been watching cartoons on their mom’s phone while riding in the cart at the grocery store. They’ve likely not known a world where the only options while waiting in line (or waiting for class to start) are striking up a conversation with the person next to them or just quietly watching the world.

Would Spaceman Spiff (Calvin and Hobbes fans will understand) have existed if Calvin had been given an iPhone? Maybe not. Have our phones stolen from us the art of daydreaming? Maybe so.

There’s a creativity to daydreaming –that other relative of distraction and procrastination– that doesn’t exist in the kind of distraction and procrastination that comes from a screen. Some of us creative weirdos would even say that daydreaming –mental margin, empty time and space to dream– is essential for our creative process. I’m one of those who would claim that. When I lost my two-hour commute to campus, I lost my prime time for mental margin: driving. I’ve since been able to replace that with a superior substitute (walking), but I hadn’t realized what I’d lost until I spent a summer sunk deep into the internet with the worst case of creative block I’d ever experienced. I point the finger of blame solidly at my tendency to scroll rather than type. I’d traded creativity for consumption, and the result was that at the end of the summer, I was exhausted and bored for no reason with nothing written to show for all my hours in the computer chair.

Since that revelation, I’ve tried to be more intentional about leaving some mental margin. I switch off my computer entirely on Saturday night before I go to bed. If I need the internet, I’ll use my iPad, but I take it off the charger. Once the charge is gone, I’m done. On Sundays I generally try (and often fail) to stick to analog: books. Notebooks. Pen and paper. I’ve very, very rarely had email on my phone (only when necessary, when I’m away from my computer and anticipate students who have trouble with an assignment), so this also means I don’t check my email on Sundays. I’ve already alerted my students (those who’ve read the syllabus, that is) that I’m offline on Sundays, so they’re aware. I will still open my email Monday morning to find a couple new emails, but I’ve not yet had a crisis over a Sunday due to abandoning my inbox for a day.

Has it helped? I believe so. Even just having that one day “off” my normal routine of morning writing and grading and taking breaks to scroll news sites or YouTube (I’m still off social media, except for a rare trip into Instagram now and then) has helped as a once-a-week reset.

Reset is an important concept. Reset, and the idea of mental margin. Some seek it by meditation, but I think there are even more possibilities for gaining that sense of openness and quiet in the mind. Prayer, for one. I spent a lot of my time up and down Highway 75 between Luverne and Sioux Center praying in an informal kind of way, just letting my thoughts go in the direction of a conversation with God. Sound weird? Maybe to some, but it’s the primary way I connect with God and find peace in the middle of things I don’t understand or don’t think I can handle. And that kind of prayer happens easily for me when there’s mental margin. It dies out when I’m surrounded by distractions. Prayer’s never been something I’ve struggled with, and I think that’s largely due to the fact that I treasure that mental margin. I notice a lack of peace, a rise of anxiety when it’s disrupted –although sometimes it takes me a whole summer to realize it.

So maybe that’s the center of all of this: mental margin. Learning to daydream again. Turning off the notifications and walking (literally) away from the screens every so often –or regularly. Here’s hoping that a conversation with my class brings about a renewed pursuit of focus –not just by trading in our iPhones for a flip phone or a weekly digital Sabbath, but learning to let ourselves rest as we go, to reclaim those before-class or in-the-hall moments by reconnecting with each other.

Oh, and my latest EDC (everyday carry) includes a flip phone. My daughter has said she gives it 3 months. (Her, in the car, trying to respond to a text while I’m driving: “This thing sucks!!” Me, quietly with an eyeroll: “Yes, that’s the point!”) I’m keeping my deactivated iPhone to use as an iPod (no Spotify on the flip phone), but it’s staying home for the most part. And no, I don’t see this as a short-term experiment. Where do I sign up for the grownup chapter of the Luddite Club?

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Where the Story Ends (and begins)

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This morning, I’m procrastinating grading the last ten papers of a bunch I should’ve had done a week (or more) ago. I decided this morning as I headed to the kitchen for my second cup of coffee that what I’m feeling on this last week of teaching at Dordt is sort of like what we call “senioritis.” I know the end is near, and so I’m having a hard time concentrating on what’s in front of me in preference for what lies ahead. Focus is a challenge.

What lies in front of me is a set of 43 seven-to-ten page papers to grade, then exams. My last day of active teaching is tomorrow. Lesson plans are done. I’ve saved the best part of the semester for last –the personal essay. I put this at the end partly to give my students a bit of a break in the middle of a season of final papers and exams and catching up. The personal essay requires no outside research, no in-text citations, no Works Cited page. It is intended to be a fun assignment, I explain. You can get confessional if you choose, but humor is acceptable also. Just write an experience of your life from your perspective. I read them a couple examples, so they know what they’re aiming for: not necessarily relatability, but relevance.

One main thing, I’ll explain tomorrow, is to be aware of your thought process as you’re writing, and to journal that process for us so that we see inside the experience to the meaning of it; to write so that we are changed somehow in our observation of whatever it is you’re writing about. I remind them that a personal essay doesn’t have to be “all about me.” If we’re blessed with sight, we go through life looking out through our two eyes. Our view of the world is outward rather than inward, and we should keep that in mind as we write a personal essay, I explain. It’s important to focus on the world outside yourself but to do it in a way that only you, the writer, can do from your perspective, to remember to explain what’s going on behind those two eyes observing the world. It’s not an easy assignment if it’s done well, but it should be far easier for them now (I hope) with the writing skills they’ve developed over the semester.

The most difficult part of the assignment, for many, is that I also require them to read their work aloud for the class during the last two class periods we’ll meet. Writing is a communal activity, I remind them. We’ve spent much of the semester approaching writing as communication, as conversation, and reading their work aloud is one way to continue that conversation. I want to give them the experience of sending their words out into an audience: their class, and seeing what comes back to them. They’ll exercise vulnerability in this, and hopefully, it’ll encourage them to include more of themselves in their writing, to show up to the page in a way they hadn’t before my class.

So, these are my last weeks of class, for now at least, what seems like the end of a long, unexpected journey from the first day I entered that same exact room as a returning student, nervous and hesitant, attempting to remedy a regret. Because I returned to the college I dropped out of in 1993 to finish and graduate in 2017, then to teach in 2019, I walk through the thin places between memory and dream and fulfillment of dreams almost daily. I’ll miss that experience. Part of me wants to tell that woman sitting down at the desk for fiction writing class, dropping her backpack next to her chair for the first time in 20 years that this is how the story ends. But then, I remember that not knowing what tomorrow brings, whether happy or tragic, is a gift also, and so is the reminder that in this moment, in this unfamiliar liminal space between academia and whatever life brings next, I can be sure of one thing: that my own story has an Author who I can trust, and that every day, I can continue walking through the dark days and the bright ones toward the eucatastrophe that waits at the end, when everything sad and wrong and evil will come untrue, and the end becomes just another new beginning into eternity.

Chapters like this one ending this month are what I keep in my pack as I walk on from here, reminders that I live as the beloved, and I can believe that the Author of the story does all things well.

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Redefining Normal

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My year’s memories will likely begin at the end of January, with a head-first tumble down the stairs at the college where I work. I landed at the bottom with a mild concussion and a badly broken wrist. A week or so later, I had surgery to put it back together, taught a couple classes online, warming up for what was to come after an extended Spring Break, when my college went to online classes for the rest of the semester, my son began doing school “virtually” from home along with his sister, who has been doing high school online since her freshman year. Sam, who’s taught online since 2009 kept on doing what he’s always done, albeit from home and with many, many new students this fall.

Summer brought my first experience of teaching a planned online course, my first time teaching literature. Fall would’ve been the first “normal” semester (as in, not a first-time, not interrupted by injury or pandemic). Of course, though, nothing’s been normal this year, and for me, that’s kind of normal. Since 2015, I’ve willingly taken on a series of new experiences –first going back to school part-time, then full-time, then graduate school afterward, add in a new part-time job at the local Casey’s for a month or two and a teaching internship. After that, teaching my own classes. It’s been all-new, all the time for the last five years, even without the every-two-or-three yearly cross-country and cross-town moves that have defined the first decade or two of our marriage.

So, I kind of have to laugh when I think of what a “normal” year is. I’m not sure I remember. What is normal, anyway? I suppose you could mean “according to one’s plans,” maybe “as expected.” Maybe “following a routine.” I guess I could use a little of that –normal. We’ll see what the next year brings. I’m looking forward to not having to have a backup plan for students in quarantine, always being prepared to “pivot” to online at a moment’s notice. Looking forward to getting a vaccine and being able to retire the masks (someday). Looking forward to in-person church, a calming of tensions over the whole thing.

Today, I’m taking a bit of a break. The photo is from my view of the sunrise this morning. It’s finally “normal” winter weather today, eleven degrees and clear at dawn. Even the weather’s been odd this winter, though that’s not been anything to complain about. My Christmas present this year was a night away to write and figure out what project is next, writing-wise.

Writing, for me, is normal, and I’ve done precious little of it this year. And solitude, though too common for many this year, has been hard to find in may case, with an entire family working and schooling at home most of the year. It’s been good, yes, but this year’s been as hard on us introverts as it has for you extroverted folks, just in a different way. I got used to coming home to an empty, quiet house after teaching, after church, and now –not so much. So, here’s to a new year, “normal” or not. At least it’s pretty certain it won’t be boring, and absolutely certain that One wiser than I will be guiding all along the way.

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Coronavirus Diaries, home happenings, learning, world happenings

Sunday Morning: Coronavirus Diaries, 3/22/20

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2020, so far, has not been kind to me. At the end of January, I fell down most of a flight of stairs on my way to my office where I teach, my journey ending in a mild concussion and a badly broken wrist. On the 31st, I had surgery to repair my wrist, and only now am I getting back to two-handed typing, handwriting, and –just in time to arm myself against anxiety caused by the recent global pandemic– knitting. And now, we’re stuck at home as I’m trying to write in the corner of my bedroom, wondering how Virginia Woolf would’ve fared under the circumstances, when the “room of my own” is routinely invaded by my kids wanting to flop on the bed and tell me they’re bored.

But today, I’m sitting at home on a Sunday morning, all of us together –my college daughter included. I’m writing while they make homemade donuts that we’ll enjoy while we’re watching the video of our church service. It could be worse. Much worse. Here we are, together, all of us relatively able to live together in fairly close quarters without becoming dangerous to each other. We have enough toilet paper, an online calculator tells me, for another eighteen days, and enough food in the pantry to feed us for over a week, if we’re a little creative once the cheese is gone. Because it’s always the cheese that goes first, of course, and cheese is literally and figuratively the stuff that holds together about 90% of our family’s favorite recipes. May God help us if any of us ever becomes lactose intolerant.

As educators, my husband and I are also blessed with jobs that translate fairly well to being done online, at home. Of course, he’s taught online for over ten years, so he’s the resident expert. I, in my first year of teaching, am still figuring everything out, and now that includes the intricacies of Canvas and Zoom and Microsoft Teams in addition to general pedagogy and how to keep a mid-day core level English Comp class engaged enough to not fall asleep during a fifteen minute lecture (still working on that one). Still, I figure, I’m only teaching one section this semester, and I have my two hour commute time back, so I have plenty of time to figure all this out. We’ll see how Tuesday goes. At any rate, we’re feeling pretty blessed in this little house this morning, especially since my son, who got the hazmat-lite treatment earlier this week at the clinic, tested positive for Influenza B and not Coronavirus. He’s mostly back to full functioning, just in time for his school to start e-learning next week. So, the count at our house is two teachers doing their teaching jobs online from home (one high school, one college), one temporarily online college student, one temporarily e-learning high school student, and one high schooler who normally does her schoolwork online. It’s going to be interesting around here next week.

So, a quiet Sunday, nowhere to go, a book or two to read, and my work is set out for me tomorrow. If it warms up, I might venture out for a walk, since they say that’s allowable, given sufficient distance from anyone I might run into outside with the same idea. For now, I think my coffee is done, so I’ll go pour myself a cup and enjoy one of my daughter’s homemade donuts while we figure out whether we can put a facebook livestream recording onto our TV. It can’t be any more difficult than setting up a Zoom meeting, can it?

 

*photo: view from our front yard, September 2016

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