I learned last week that a new crafting fad has resulted in several of my school's female students bringing knitting with them to class. Of course, they don't do it in my class. They also don't open laptops, sent texts, write letters or wear pajamas. Recently, I've been wondering what to think about all this.
Because I was born in 1950 and because in my early youth the word "co-ed" was still very much in play, female students knitting in class carries a very heavy iconic charge for me. You can learn about this in Germaine Greer's early feminist work The Female Eunuch. Greer, teaching in American Univerities from Austrailia in the early 1960s, was horrified to find young women coming to college to get their "Mrs." degree, and writes that she often had to lecture to entire classrooms of young girls counting stitches. Once she got pissed off and announced "Of course, as well all know, Western Civilization is coming to an end!" The student sitting right in front of her put down her knitting and wrote "western civ coming to an end," and then went on knitting.
Last week I entertained a job candidate from a State University, who told me that students in courses there stand on their right to text and send texts and instant messages.
"They say they're paying for the class time and feel it is theirs to use as they want," my colleague said.
Bull-SHIT!" I said. (I'm not always the best host.) "None of your students are paying for their class time. Either their parents or their state's taxpayers are paying for their asses to be in those seats. And I'm betting they would be pissed off to learn they were paying fifty thousand bucks a year for their kid to send IMs."
On Friday last week I had to drive a carload of students to Gainesville, where they were delivering conference papers. One of these was about the cancelled Fox series Dollhouse the notion of disembodied information developed by N. Katherine Hayles in her marvelous but difficult book, How we Became Posthuman" The presentation was so cool! It was smart, ambitious, very professionally delivered; really, I am so proud to be teaching such good and hard-working students. But -- here's the thing -- the kid sitting in the front seat next to me had his iPhone in his hand the whole fucking trip. He was cordial and kept up a very fine conversation with me. But he was sending texts and running applications the whole way. In the back, two students were sharing an iPod and talking with us all out of the ear they each had unplugged. Again, these are students I respect and admire. So, something is going on that I don't quite get.
It may be argued that texting or listening to your own music while you're with somebody else alters the nature of what we call "presence." This is a big word in our philosophical tradition, and to alter presence is to shift what we mean when we talk about human being. Maybe these devices and applications have ushered in a new form of social interaction, another shape of "presence." Or maybe not. In at least one respect -- to follow Hayles a bit -- iPhones and netbooks are just new prosthetics for daydreaming in class. They make a grumpy old fart like me realize that none of us are ever fully present to each other -- what some people call "living in the moment"; none of us can do that. Hell, if I had a nickel for every time during my years in school I caught my self daydreaming or sexually fantasizing about my classmates or, yes, my teacher, I wouldn't need this job now. In other words, maybe our presence to one another, in or out of class, is too much for us to bear, and maybe it is a part of our nature to have these formalized time outs.
But this brings me back to the classroom, in which I forbid all this bullshit. It seems to me that classes, especially college classes, especially in the humanities, are supposed to dignify both the intensity of our social contact and our flight from it. My sense is that courses in literature are supposed to be exercises in focus, intensity, and sustained mental activity. The idea here is not to get students to focus on their work and intellectual growth for an hour and a half: the idea is to get them to try. But this idea is moving to the periphery of contemporary pedagogies.
Students coming to a lit class from the sciences will often complain "I don't know what you want!" And, to be sure, acing a chem test where there are questions to be answered and right and wrong answers to be given, furnishes a satisfaction that writing a Master's Thesis on "Polysemy in Paradise Lost" (which is what Sue just did) can never give you. By their nature, studies in the humanities withhold just this sense of being finished and accomplished. But what they do instead is to compel an examination of what it means to break up our presence to one another and to the ideas that matter most to us with prosthetic day dreaming tools.
When an institution erodes its humanities curriculum, like mine is doing right now, it also renders invisible and unimportant the very space that is opened up by a kind of study where students need to be able to find issues in texts and to find topics for study. I used to leave blank spaces on my syllabi for students to fill in with reading materials they wanted to include in the course. That worked until about five years ago, when students began reacting to this with irritation and resentment. Now, they want to know what I want. This is not because they are shallow and only thinking about their grade: it is because this is how learning looks to them now and this is what knowledge has become for them. I think in part this is because they don't know what it feels like to be entirely present to a subject of study or even to a task.
So, for now, there's no knitting in my classes. Not just because I'm a grump who doesn't want to live in the world of Mona Lisa Smile, but also because what I teach loses its value and even its visibility when you don't think you have to look for it yourself.
