TOADTalk by Mr. Lin: Slow Learning

 

What little I know about Twitter suggests that we can reduce our interpersonal communications to tweets of 140 characters and, according to Twitter itself, it is “without a doubt the best way to share and discover what is happening right now.” That we might need to know what is happening to anyone right now and that this crucial information can be expressed in a mere 140 characters, not words, but characters, suggests something troubling to me. Should we care and do we need to know this? A recent Verizon commercial, which seems simultaneously to promote and satirize the keyboarding features of their new phones shows a mom and a dad reclined on their patio, busily texting from their phones. A boy and his sister are also on their phones, texting or tweeting. The boy says to his father, “I know we’re back at school now, but you’re going a little overboard with the new phones…And Dad, cool it with the Twitter updates, okay?” His Dad then reads aloud his tweet: “I’m sitting on the patio…” His son, exasperated, responds: “I know you’re sitting on the patio!” What the father tweets is insignificant and silly, and the sad part of this scene is that he does not seem able to differentiate this information from something else that might merit communicating to his son. In a landscape cluttered with 140-character tweets about nothing at all, how are we to develop the attention needed to listen to important and substantial communication or read anything that demands our attention for more than the time a tweet takes to read? How can we establish a bond of empathy to others when what connects us are these tenuous and insubstantial communications?

 

How did we get here, that we have evolved into a species that tweets? Maybe because we live in a world overloaded with information and have not developed the attendant faculty to discern the good and useful from the harmful and useless that we subscribe to even quicker ways to propagate information in an indiscriminate manner. Maybe because we live in a culture that is so highly ambitious and future-focused that we develop technologies that allow us to do things more quickly without regard for whether we’re doing it better. Maybe because we have lost the ability to appreciate the Joshua Bell moments Mr. Elmore spoke about in his TOADTalk last year. Maybe because we no longer have the patience to slow down and see in different detail what is before us that we give such currency to speed and immediate feedback, covering ground while racing towards a perilous future. I, too, worry about empathy and wonder if we are moving too quickly past one another to develop this very human feeling. I worry about the pace of our lives, and because I am a teacher, I wonder if we have lost touch with the ultimate purpose of our work in schools and even our time on earth.

 

Too often in society and schools we are like Virginia Woolf's Mr. Ramsay in her novel To the Lighthouse, who, driven to get from A to Z in his imagine path to success, lets the present moments elude him as he pursues the ever-receding and unattainable future that is the product of his ambition. He feels behind, a failure at mid-life, stuck on the letter Q.

Though Mr. Ramsay does realize that he may never reach R, for “he had not the genius,” and that the fame he seeks is fleeting, that “the very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare,” he still finds it hard to abandon a paradigm he has established in his mind that to stop short of Z is to fail. So in the end,

Who indeed would blame Mr. Ramsay for seizing the beauty of that present moment to sit in the loving embrace of his family? Just as hard as it is for James Ramsay to pause long enough to pay homage to the world’s beauty while on his hero’s quest for fame, success, and even vindication, we teachers and schools seem equally determined to pursue a notion of excellence that puts us on a trajectory not towards fulfillment and happiness, but instead towards a kind of disgrace and failure, not towards beauty but towards the pursuit of the next stop on the way to Z. By setting academic goals that seem always to exceed our grasp, whether institutionally or individually, we spend more time striving than achieving. As an English teacher, I have been lured by the cult that professes more is better, that piles on the reading and measures the quality of learning by the weight of the texts and the difficulty or length of assignments. In a department of a venerable school where I once taught, there was a course called “Novel and Drama,” known among students as “Grovel and Trauma,” and truly the texts on the reading list could induce both emotional and physical injury from their sheer weight. In graduate school, one course was known both by the number of pages of required reading and the weight of the books on the reading list. That both of these offerings and their teachers were vastly popular suggests that not only are we giving our students what we think they need, but we also are catering to what they seem to want. In San Francisco, certain private elementary schools are thought to be more academically rigorous, and hence better, because of the amount of homework that is assigned at the earliest grades. In a required course with a common syllabus that I taught recently, I found that I could not keep pace with the schedule of reading as published. I eliminated one text, and though one might think that my students would be relieved, as some were, many were frustrated that we were not keeping pace with their classmates, that they were somehow falling behind in some imagined race to a completely fictional finish. It seems that they had no way to measure any potential benefit from our having slowed things down; all they saw was a deficit left by the omitted text.

 

Never do we count success in schools by doing less, and as I consider the tuition for independent schools, I recognize that annual increases will most likely not abate since we are in perpetual pursuit of a certain type of excellence defined by growth. Can we shift from a paradigm of continued growth—new and fancy buildings and the latest technologies and devices—to one of consolidation and conservation and still maintain excellence?

 

I looked at my own life, and despite the many attempts to reduce, reuse, and recycle, I keep ending up with more stuff. I feel that I am living a good and responsible life, but to what extent is this quality of life dependent on new and better things? A quest to grow and to improve might be seen as ambition; we all want to know more, get ahead and have better things. But when will enough be enough? Will less ever be more in our culture of striving and acquiring?

 

Bill McKibben in his book Enough expresses this idea: “We need to do an unlikely thing: We need to survey the world we now inhabit and proclaim it good. Good enough.” Though I read about many schools and their efforts to model and teach sustainability, I also hear in the background a mantra based on the title of Jim Collins’ bestseller, Good to Great, which serves to motivate us to turn very good schools to great ones. Good to great. I am left to wonder if we will know greatness when we encounter it, in schools or anywhere, and should we ever arrive in this place of greatness, will our questing end, will we be satisfied, will we be able to say, finally, “Enough” and amend our striving to being good enough? Just good enough?

 

Though I am not sure that Twitter itself will lead to the withering of empathy among us as there are other more pernicious and deadly ways we have devised to do this, I do have a sense that the pace of our lives and education today may be leading us to a place we do not want to go and teaching lessons that we do not intend to teach. If we believe that perseverance, tenacity, diligence, along with engagement and even empathy are values critical to the success and happiness of our children, our students, then I hope we will discover new ways to value both the essential connectedness that we all need as human communities, that we might revise and enlarge our current notion of excellence in life and schools to accommodate deeper learning, more sustained connections, and ultimately, that we teach you, our students, to pause long enough on your life’s journeys to pay homage to the beauty of the world.

 

 

The title for this essay derives, of course, from the slow food movement. According to the Slow Food International website (www.slowfood.com), this group has the following mission:

I am interested in the slow food movement both theoretically and a consumer of food, fast and slow. As a teacher, I have found myself increasingly drawn to what I call slow learning. My version of the slow learning mission would be as follows: