Another Reason Teachers Are Needed

Last Friday, I offered my students extra credit if they were to buy their own copies of the next novel we would be reading in class: The Great Gatsby and 1984, for my juniors and seniors respectively.

Today in class, a number of students told me that they went to Barnes & Noble and had a difficult time trying to find the book. They knew it was located in the fiction section, but when they looked up the title the book wasn't there. They were searching for the book by TITLE. My students assumed the store shelved books alphabetically by "title."

Immediately, I realized that they don't go to the library for books. Heck, our school even moved out many of our books to a storage portable classroom. When we teach research skills, almost all the research is done electronically now. There is no logical mindset for our students, no rhyme or reason for how information is stored, particularly in the form of books.

I asked my students why they searched for it by title. Response: "Because that's what you do when you google search. You input what information you need to know." And this makes a whole lot of sense from their point-of-view. They are accustomed to instant access. Put in the key word in the search box and suddenly a list of responses spews forth. The thought that the non-digital world works the same way makes perfect sense.

so what does this mean and why am I bothered?

Students rarely ever read, much less go to a bookstore to buy a book. If they enter one, it's probably to go to the cafe and grab a coffee and red velvet cupcake. Just about any day of the year, a U.S. resident can pick up a newspaper and read that American scores are falling and we're lagging sorely behind the rest of the world. America's best students may still be able to compete with the world elite, but the student majority seem to lack motivation.

I often wonder why is it that I felt compelled to learn when I was a student, why was I willing to do what many of my students are not, what changed in the world/society in the past 20 years since I graduated from high school. Maybe, the Cold War and the Nuclear Arms Race pushed my generation into making math & science a priority. I did grow up next to an army base and the military was an omnipresent entity during my formative years. I feel like my generation grew up with a bit of fear in our hearts. As kids, we saw watched "The Day After" on TV and began to consider the flight time and paths of ICBM's in Siberia. We were pushed to learn, for if we didn't, we may not survive. War, natural disaster, famine... many generations seems to have been marked by some kind of moment, whether it was Vietnam, the Cuban Missle Crisis, World Wars, the Great Depression, Industrial Revolution (and that's just the 20th century). I wonder if today's teenagers have anything to truly fear.

I realize that the 90s began with the Bay Area recovering from the Loma Prieta Quake of '89. As the area tried to heal, our school's rival football game, the Bell Game, experienced a bomb blowing up the scoreboard just before half time. A couple months later, my classmates and I were fixated to the images on CNN when the U.S. went into Iraq for the first time. The decade continued, and as the Bay Area recovered, prosperity came with an economic boom largely due to Silicon Valley. Yet, teenagers at our school soon learned about tragedy when the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado arrived at the end of the decade.

The world transformed as the internet became accessible to the masses. Emails and chatrooms allowed long distance instant communication. Pagers allowed people to get in touch and develop a pager language which is now supplanted by texting. And with cell phones, the tethers to being a grounded person were broken and freedom of access to the world created new visions. Students were born into a new technological world, and instant gratification of food, text, youtube, social networking created new invisible tethers in which a perfect world continues as long as an electric pulse courses through our digital veins.

I wonder if today's teenagers feel any sense of purpose, drive. Terrorism once was a mark for my students to instill some of that fear, but even that didn't seem to take a firm hold with the enemy being elusive and without a constant face or symbol to rally against. Anything that may have been something to fear now only appears to as a surreal image that belonged in a film. I remember the most common comment from all my students after 9/11 was that it felt like they were watching a movie.

Our world seems detached from itself. No matter how closely we may be connected through a wireless network populated with hundreds of psuedofriends on Facebook, students do not really know how to communicate. Students don't even talk to teach other. They don't have those nights I grew up having when I would sneak on the phone in the kitchen and stretch out the cord to the next room so I could stealthily have a conversation with my newest infatuation. They text each other and say LOL without experiencing any real laughter. Why say LOL when you could just laugh?

Almost every vision they have now seems to be provided by some director (the media, the film, the internet). The ability to imagine a story is nearly impossible for many teenagers. They want to be force fed and told how to view something rather than paint an image for themselves. Every time I have a student ask for the movie of a certain story or book, I ask why? So they can "see" the story. I remind them that they are only being shown one person's, one media source's perspective. Isn't this true of an author writing a book as well? But the students need to construct and build their own walls instead of trapping themselves within artificial ones.

One of the biggest points I try to make in class about reading is this. Why would so many conquerors destroy a defeated enemy's books, take them out to the town square and burn them? Why would leaders and governments censor the news or try to control it? Why are they throwing away a right for which so many gave their lives? A right they learn about personally form Frederick Douglass' Autobiography. Why are they allowing themselves to be subjugated to the whims of whoever controls the information?

I can only hope that reading 1984 will help open their own eyes.