Stephen and Henry

The cycle of a student or a teacher is a tough one to break. There is the excitement of the new term with new classes and books. There are new faces and routines. This time there will not be any grammar errors in my syllabi, or the teacher will not be super mean but rather fun and interesting.

Unfortunately, I find myself at the end of that cycle right in the middle of Advent. It seems unfair. Someone needs to move Christmas to September or maybe February. It is hard to look at the faces of the shining kids, decked out in their best shirt or dress, and not to interrupt them in their “pitchy” rendition of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear”.

I do not want to be the Grinch, but at the end of term, that is what I am. All the potential has been spent, and it is the end of the line. I must become the Dream-Crusher. I know that it is an oversimplification. My students get what they earned.

So, it is hard to not run up the aisle and say, “Stop! Stop being so hopeful. most of you will struggle your entire lives. Yes, toys are fun, but you will grow up and lose the excitement and curiosity (or have it tested or drugged out of you). You will become bored and sad.”

But then that frustration and inclination relies on a misunderstanding. Unlike what I hear on the radio and TV, and often from a variety of pulpits, my faith is not a matter of making everything ok, at least not yet. The promise of the Messiah includes with the “Joy to the World” and “Gloooorrrrria”‘s a promise of the suffering and victory of Good Friday and Easter.

So, just as my terms carry with them a certain amount of sadness, nativity scenes always carry a good deal of grief in my heart as well. I used to drive by a church with a Nativity creche right in front of the building, and right behind that small, plastic baby Jesus, with his entourage, was a looking cross the size of a building.

While I can find joy and excitement at the promise of the season, the reality of the life ahead of that small baby humbles me nearly to tears. Within the cries for food and warmth at his beginning on earth were the tears of “Jesus wept.”. Those small hands and feet would be pierce with nails and left to hang as he struggled for breath on the cross. Those eyes, still bleary from birth, would greet Mary in the Garden on the morning of his resurrection and be surprised that she did not know him.

That is real potential, and I wish that I could give my students just a small fraction of that.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Stephen Swanson teaches as an assistant professor of English at McLennan Community College. Aside from guiding students through the pitfalls of college writing and literature, he spends most of his time trying to remain  aware of popular culture, cooking, and enjoying time with his wife and son. He holds degrees in Communications (Calvin College), Film Studies (Central Michigan University), and Media and American Culture Studies (Bowling Green State University. In addition to editing a collection, Battleground States: Scholarship in Contemporary America, he has forthcoming projects on Johnny Cash and depiction of ethics in detective narratives.

Stephen Swanson

Thanks to my participation in a faculty new media seminar, I have received a wonderful tool, a valuable gift to broaden my mind, an iPad. While I could write a great deal about how I benefit from the longer battery life and minimized weight, these traits do not approach the central question of the role of technology in our world and what would make me more able to provide a contribution to my communities, both large and small.

This reading for this week deals with the possibilities of rethinking how education looks and feels in the future. I know that Relief is not an education or technology venue, but as I think about the roles of writing and reading, I cannot but help to think about the impacts of these acts on those participating with informal education versus my students who engage in formal education towards unclear ends. The lack of motivation and direction of the “youth” has long been decried, but are things different now? Are there significant problems with the next generation of learning and learners, and if so, then what?

Well, in theory, the hope lies, for some, in technology, like online education, open universities, nontraditional education, and iPads, but the fears of thinkers like Jacques Ellul come to mind about the changes that the technologies work on us as we leave a “natural world” and more frequently inhabit a technological world of their own creation.

At least according to Ellul, this has a tendency to push us away from faith and spirituality, a connection to the transcendent because we become more connected with the Technique. I think that, to me, this becomes obvious in my use of the iPad. Sure, there are a lot of useful things that I do with it, including writing this post, but it tethers me while promising mobility.

I have an app for finding free Wifi spots wherever I am. We Rule and We Farm tether me in time and space as I ask, “Will I be able to harvest my eggplants and pet my llama?”. I grow more and more “docked” with the technology, even as it promises freedom.

This week in my Graphic Novels as Literature class, we are discussing the graphic novel adaptation of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and what it is saying about consumption of media and the relationship between form, content, and the effect on the people engaged with form and content. This seemed, to me, to grow directly from the discussion we’d been having since we read Scott McCloud‘s Understanding Comics at the beginning of term.

However, this is not what happened. The idea that form, content, and meaning might influence each other appeared anathema to them. “There’s nothing wrong with Michael Bay films! I love them.” “Yes,” I answer, “There is nothing wrong with Bay as a singularity, but Bradbury is arguing about what happens when that’s all there is, reaction and not contemplation.” “But, what about Harry Potter?”

The fact that they struggle so much stems, to me, not so much from the ideas themselves but from the process of thought itself, and this lack of familiarity with depth, texture, and what Faber, in Fahrenheit 451, calls the “pores” in life comes from, at least in part, the technology and our assumptions about it. It will teach us, connect us, warm us, cool us, protect us, and solve our problems eventually in some lab somewhere. It’s easy to see where Bradbury and Ellul might see this type of relationship between people and technology as a replacement of meaning, depth, and faith.

But, look at how cool my iPad looks on my desk with my monitor and laptop,

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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Stephen Swanson teaches as an assistant professor of English at McLennan Community College. Aside from guiding students through the pitfalls of college writing and literature, he spends most of his time trying to remain  aware of popular culture, cooking, and enjoying time with his wife and son. He holds degrees in Communications (Calvin College), Film Studies (Central Michigan University), and Media and American Culture Studies (Bowling Green State University. In addition to editing a collection, Battleground States: Scholarship in Contemporary America, he has forthcoming projects on Johnny Cash and depiction of ethics in detective narratives.