Month: October 2013

Yesterday we had an education class come in and, essentially, teach us how to teach. In the next coming weeks, we have to teach middle school classes something about technology. As interesting as it was to find out the thinking behind what teachers make us do in class, I don’t think teaching is for me. I found it difficult even to think of an idea, figure out what was important to get across, come up with ways to teach it, and then create some sort of assessment to see if the students understood what I taught. It takes extreme patience and social skills to be a good teacher; all characteristics that I admire and respect, but not necessarily what I think I excel at.

Overall, I learned that teachers need to create goals for the class on the large and small scale – what do I want students to do this semester? what am I going to get across today? Then, they need to recheck in with those goals constantly by assessing, reevaluating and discussing. Things like essential questions, skills, understandings, and knowledge all make up the content and purpose of a class or a course. All of this I understand while separated from it, but how do I actually get up in front of the class and teach?

I’m struggling even with the task of choosing a topic: what do the students already know? what would be useful to them? what am I allowed/not allowed to talk about? It’s extremely difficult to find out what’s relevant to the students and their classes without having the students for a long period of time. I guess this is how substitutes feel like.

The art of traveling usually depends on apps and 4G, but the beautiful thing about not having a smart phone is trying to get around without those things. This fall break, I visited a very good friend of mine who goes to school in Boston. To get there, of course, I reserved my tickets online, but the rest was up to me. The bus dropped us off around the corner from South Station, where I depended on instructions from my friend that I had jotted down and the good nature of Bostonians (joke) to get to where I was going. Though people in the city especially up North aren’t known to be super friendly, I managed to meet a few people as I navigated the subway. It was engaging – checking the maps, finding the right station, looking at street signs and such. I got there speedily and efficiently without any GPS! That was relatively easy. As the weekend progressed, I started to understand Boston because I had to plan out how to get places. Instead of having directions laid out for me, I had to be able to tell my friend where I was, find a place that was convenient to meet up, and get there. That was the real challenge, but it made me know Boston better.

It reminded me of when I first started driving versus when I started driving without a smart phone. For the first two years I had my license, I depended on my phone to get around my own city. This past summer, however, I had to actually learn where things were. I started to notice where places connected and where friends’ houses were in relation to each other. I’m not known for having a great sense of direction, so I needed a bit of a push to actually know where I was going. Which, I guess, is part of the reason I decided to stay dumb with my phone choice.

As I watched Disconnected yesterday – on a computer in the library, I must point out – I struggled with the purpose for which someone would ever attempt to go without a computer for three weeks. The students in the movie, I think, found that over and over again they were only frustrating librarians, teachers and friends alike. In the end they simply needed to rely on others to do their computer work for them. One of the kids’ boss had to log his work hours for him, the same person had to make a friend send out an email for him, the other guy made his classmate who works at the library look up the call numbers for certain books for him, etc. Perhaps going through the process of realizing that most systems are online has value in itself, but to me it seems impossible to live without computers while being a student. It is certainly possible to take a long backpacking trip or to buy a cabin in the woods where you live happily without computers, but in the modern university it is pretty much required to have your own personal computer.

In the end these three people found that even without computers, they depended on computer systems simply to survive as a student. If someone tried to do this today, it would be even more difficult. The students in the documentary  used the typewriters available in the library to type their work, whereas today typewriters aren’t even accessible. They are fully put away, shelved, or fully trashed by 2013. One of the guys registered for classes by paper, which probably wouldn’t be possible at Middlebury anymore either, unless you wanted to get the last pick of classes or make someone to register online for you.

It is important to understand that most of our systems to make a university work depend on computers, but trying to reject computers only puts yourself at a disadvantage and inconveniences everyone around you. You don’t need a smartphone, an ipod, a camera, or an ipad, per say, but you do need to be able to use a computer, and that will never change.

In a small cabin overlooking the sun setting on Lake Champlain this past Saturday, my family discussed the beginnings of computers and the internet. I casually asked my parents, “What was it like when computers and the internet were first starting?” They both rolled their eyes and were brought back to another world in which computers took up entire rooms. The first programming classes consisted of typing keys into a machine that would create stacks of cards with holes in them. My dad would bring stacks of cards in to the computer to be run, and the next day he would get a “print out” in his mailbox of what the program did. He would either get some sort of language that indicated the program didn’t work, or he got multiple pages of what the program accomplished overnight. The idea was that the holes in these cards allowed wires to make contact with the metal below the cards, which signaled zeros and ones. If you got your cards out of order? Man, you’re screwed.

“Back in the day…” my dad was working with bits. Eight bits to a byte, 1024 bytes to a megabyte, etc. Nowadays, a single photo is multiple megabytes. My iPod holds thirty gigabytes – that’s 257698037760 bits of information.

My dad reminisced about the day that Windows came out with their first software. His eyes got big and he shook his head caught up in the memory, “That was huge.”

I have no real point in this blog post other than HOLY COW! I can’t even begin to understand how small computer memory started out, let alone what it was like to see that happen. When my dad got out of grad school and started working, he was the first person in his office to have a computer. Company tours included going to see the “Harvard Grad With A Computer.” How incredible is that? He has seen computers develop from the beginning up to today, when he manages huge files on his touchscreen iPad using complex programs without even touching the zeros and ones.

Every time I log on to email since I’ve been a college student, I have around 10 messages waiting for me. I’m on every email list, every club page, and every interest group you could sign up for. Since computers are a source of stress for me (unless I’m watching Netflix…), whenever I have things like email or long texts to respond to, I go into super efficient mode. Email is kind of a necessary, super convenient evil for me. I have to do it, I would never stop doing it, it really does help me with school and social life, but in the back of my head it’d be nice if it weren’t such a part of our society.

When I do email, I sit straight up and block out what’s going on around me until I’ve dealt with all the new messages. It really has felt since arriving on campus like you miss out if you don’t pay attention to your email. To become a Mountain Club Guide, I need to be on top of club email blasts; to do my homework, a lot of the time I receive and hand in assignments over email. Even social events on weekends I wouldn’t know about if I didn’t pay attention to my messages. I group them all into different “folders” – school, clubs, events, info, travel, personal, etc., so I basically just try to get them out of my inbox. This method reflects pretty well my feelings toward email, in general – just trying to get it out of the way as soon as possible.

I don’t know how to stop my negative feelings toward email. Sometimes the influx of messages is just too much for any information to get through to me – but how do I, or we, change that?

This Friday, I went backpacking with the mountain club for the night. We left from behind Proctor at 12:10 and quickly left areas of cell phone service. My phone, which was already on low battery, proceeded to die. Until the next day around 3 in the afternoon, I was media fasting yet again! What I thought was interesting, though, was the difference between this week and last.

Last weekend, when I ran around Burlington in a cow suit while everyone I was with remained connected to the digital world, I was an outsider. The experience wasn’t particularly uncomfortable, nor was it extremely difficult to be without technology, but there was a marked difference between myself and the people around me. People who knew that I was fasting from digital media kept forgetting not to text me or show me a YouTube video. In this way, I stood out from the crowd.

This weekend, on the other hand, not only was I fasting from digital media, but everyone I was with also participated in the “fast”. Since there was no service wherever we went, we pulled out the paper maps, turned off the cellphones, and limited ourselves to the technology of our backpacks, a stove and a few flashlights. It was not an intentional or planned event, even, it just happened! I think that is one of the best things about backpacking and camping – letting go of our cell phones and the internet. It reminded me also of something Nancy Baym said in her book Personal Connections in a Digital World: technology only takes away from a relationship when the people involved disagree about the usage of technology. When one person sitting at the lunch table wishes everyone else would stop using their phones, there is tension that could hurt their relationships, but if that person is just as content as the others, nothing negative happens. Conversely, when a group of people agree not to use technology, they are similarly compatible.

I am the type of person that loses my phone for 2 hours without even realizing it. I think it’s rude for people to text when we are spending time together, and I think that the presence of computers in the classroom takes away from discussion. This is one of the many reasons, or maybe they just go hand in hand, that I like spending time outdoors. I recognize the extensive benefits of technology and am not denying the fact that I rely on it for most of my schoolwork, but for me, to stay in touch with myself, I need to leave that realm every once in awhile. It was nice to reflect on the difference between this week’s fast and last week’s  – one was purposeful and intentional, and one was merely accidental.