Dispatches From the Trenches
The Keyboard is Mightier
I am beginning to believe that my generation has seen some of the broadest cultural shifts of any that has passed…but of course, I suppose that people of every age have believed that about themselves. Even the ancient accountant who said, “You know, Xenophon, perhaps we should put away those beans and try out this new-fangled abacus” undoubtedly believed that he was inducing sweeping change.
A man born in 1890 who lived to be eighty would have seen the turn of the century, two world wars, the rise of the automobile, the advancement of commercial flight, the eruption of rock ’n’ roll, the Civil Rights Movement, the assassinations of MLK and two Kennedys, the first lunar landings, and so on - all a pretty good argument for his time on earth as the pre-eminent historical observer.
Yet consider this: as a boomer born in 1958 and turning a mere sixty this year, I have been privy to the most significant technological shifts modern civilizations have ever seen: the ability to transmit and glean information instantaneously, as well as the perpetual shrinking of the mechanisms by which we do it.
I have been a teacher of literature and writing for nearly twenty-eight years now and need only look at a handful of changes in the way I do my job in order to see the impact of computer technology. I don’t recall the first year that I typed grades and comments into a computer program, but it was probably in the mid-1990s. Until that time, my poor students and their parents had to struggle to read my scrawling. I’ll never forget the teary-eyed sophomore who came to me to ask why I had written that she was “horsing around this quarter in class.” She calmed down after I explained that what I had actually written was that she was “having a sound third quarter in class.”
Email has forever changed the way teachers communicate with parents and students. In addition to individual conferences every semester and the odd afternoon phone call just before happy hour, I am now obliged to read and respond to a stream of emails from over-zealous parents who wish to monitor their children throughout the day: “Crenshaw’s irritable bowel flared up this morning. Please allow him to see the nurse as needed,” or “Crenshaw left his p.e. shorts on the breakfast table this morning. His older sister will drop them off on your desk around ten.” Still, I suppose the involved parent is preferable to the ones that I never hear from at all (and there are plenty of those).
The weight of administrative tasks has been greatly increased by computer technology. I know - advanced communication capability was supposed to make us more efficient…but such has not been the case, sadly. Certainly we have saved a good deal of printer paper, but it is a special brand of anxiety that sinks in when I open my mailbox every hour and find ten new emails demanding my immediate attention. On the other hand, fun is frowned upon: please do not take up valuable kilobytes with trash talk about your alma mater’s basketball team or links to noteworthy articles in The Onion.
These are only three of a myriad of drastic shifts that have occurred in one educator’s daily life in this “developed” world. As to further changes bound to happen at any second, I still take some comfort in thinking back to a workshop I attended roughly twenty years ago, during which a young professor of literature showed us his website. He said that everything he did throughout a given semester or so was there: all the lectures, word-for-word, all assignments, even audio clips of birds honking to enhance a reading of Yeats’s “The Wild Swans at Coole” were accessible at the touch of a fingertip. After his presentation, I asked him, “Has it occurred to you that now that everything you do is on a website for your students’ edification, your university no longer really needs you? The real you, I mean, not the virtual you.”
“I’m not worried about that,” he replied. “I just heard a great lecture last week by an expert in higher education. He made an air-tight argument that students still need interaction with real people. There will always be a need for teachers, since there’s no substitute for the human touch.”
“Interesting. Was it at your college or someplace else?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I watched it online.”