The Written or the Spoken

You know them early in a class: the speakers.  Once they out themselves, some categorizing is in order: the verbal processors, the salesmen, the cover crops.  Some students process verbally while the rest of us wait for them to find their thought; some take the topic and sell it back to you, for a grade; some are just trying to cover and they expect that volunteering anything at all will float them through, but the oats they sow in what they say burns up under the sun of cross-examination since the soil underneath is all clay and stone.

Some teachers are big on the risk needed to learn--everyone talks, everyone must process aloud and join in this group endeavor.  I dreaded classes where I would be outed.  I came to the study of literature due to that dread.  Sometimes, I didn't know what I thought, found those who did to be messengers of God himself.  I was forced to try my hand and it worked out for the best but man was it uncomfortable.

But write my responses--that was a piece of tiramisu.  Give me time and a pen or keypad, however, and I was much more at ease.  And found I did, in the end, have thoughts. What can you say in twenty-minute class discussion compared to a five minute writing exercise?  A lot more.  I process as a writer.

A colleague of mine recently taught The Things They Carried, a Vietnam war book.  He failed to call on the one Asian kid in the class--rightfully so--to see if he had any "special" knowledge on the place.  Then, after the fact, the student volunteered that indeed he had been to Vietnam and scene the tunnels dug by the Vietcong.

How could he have gotten the student to volunteer this information?  We speculated as to how it might have been done--and whether it would have happened more easily in writing.

As I enter online teaching, I know the written response will play a major role.  I like that idea; then again, that's how I process, in the written word--and, more specifically, as this blog shows, in one form of the written word which is increasingly the long written form.

But that should give me pause as well--as I consider the speakers and those for whom the written word, the keyboard, the long form is forbidding and ominous.  

And this brings us back to all the intuition that's central to teaching:  to figure out quickly who your students are, how they're trying to manage, what's their natural language, the written or the spoken. 

Medium?

Technology is not neutral;  I know this.  It's also not simply negatively charged; I also know this.  The computer is a tool for creativity.  Okay.  Course Management Systems are a medium for great creativity.

That white space is silence.

In my logical mind, I know that our CMS (names of things that need to be made into abbreviations are bad names so let me try again)--I know that Canvas is trying to be exactly that: a canvas on which to create beautiful courses.  I see what other people do on their blogs--with pictures and links and multimedia and formatting and such and I recognize it as pleasing, and even, in extreme cases, beautiful.

Heck, as I began to think about my own online course, I thought about pictures and videos and an NPR article that I could link to the course "map," and the idea of it was very--or at least decently--good. 

The problem is, I've decided, that I don't respond well to the medium, don't find surfing around and grabbing things and linking them and prettifying them all that compelling.

Then again, it's not that I find the classroom compelling, either--I mean, as a medium.  "Medium" implies a lack of immediacy.  When you read Tess of the D'Urbervilles in a cement brick classroom with vinyl tiles, it makes you want to wield a sledgehammer; when you read Tess of the D'Urbervilles in Dorset, England, the book is still dreary and maddening, but it makes you sad and melancholy rather than making you go postal. 

It was a trip to Britain to study literature on location that sent me, somewhat unwillingly at first, into the classroom.  In the classroom, the Herculean effort of teachers is one of transcending medium: to use the mind and imagination to leave the classroom even when you don't.  That's hard work.

Now, this summer I'm supposed to take this classroom work into another medium, one that in many respects has more possibilities than a brick-and-mortar classroom: consider this blog as an attempt to convince myself that this is true.

But a cyber classroom is still a medium, just with different walls, and it's still the thing I will be trying to get readers--my students--to transcend. 

Perhaps that's my fear of this medium: I know there are people who like its walls, who prefer to stay within its walls.  That's dangerous, I think, and perhaps that's one of the reasons I'm hesitant to throw myself into this medium of online education.

Because the point is the immediacy of literature and life; the point is to break through the medium to something fuller and more true.

Then again, that's the danger of literature itself:  that people like to stay within its pages.  I know that enjoying stories has value in itself, but I'm very much an application person myself.  I read so that I might experience differently, better, fuller.

 So, I'm telling myself at the end of this blog, the point is not "the medium."  The point is "the full,"but you've got to go through medium to get there.