Capturing Reality

"Daddy, what are you doing?" my daughter asks me. 

"I'm setting up the camera," I tell her. 

"Why?" 

"So I can take a picture of you guys in front of the waterfall," I respond. 

"Why?" she asks. 

"So I can capture this moment and keep it forever," I tell her.  

"Why do you have to capture it?  Can't this moment run free?" she asks. 

***

Paul the Preindustrial Poet refuses to use cameras at all.  "I took one picture of my wife and kids," he explains. "But the picture was of me.  It was me, detached, looking through a lens, hiding behind a cloud of smoke." 

"So you never take pictures?" I ask. 

"Never," he says. 

"A hard line," I tell him. 

"I don't want to miss a minute of life." 

"Tell me, do you ever let your mind wander?" 

"Yeah," he says.  "I see where you're trying to lead me.  The issue of detachment isn't about technology. And it's not as if we can carry cameras in our pockets, either.  But technology makes it that much easier to capture reality in a way that we miss it.  We become recorders rather than participants," he says. 

"But we've been recording since the dawn of man.  Camp fires and cave walls.  It's deeply human to capture it.  I'd argue that reality is an act of imagination.  What we see as real, how we tell our stories . . . I don't know, those are an act of memory, but more an act of what we imagine to be real.  We're constantly filling in the details." 

"So, why not reflect later and participate now? Why not allow your memory to be the recorder?" 

"Because photos are more accurate." 

"Depends on how you define accuracy," Paul explains.  "The camera is always black and white and always framing the story.  How is that any different from memory?" 

"True, but in the moment, you gather evidence.  You find tokens.  You hold onto letters or images or you remember conversations.  We're always reinterpreting our story at every moment.  This notion that somehow we 'live now' and 'interpret later' is crazy.  We're always doing both.  Always." 

"But for me, I'd rather be present with my family than allow a medium to get in the way.  See, the scary thing for me is that the lens looks transparent, but it makes me opaque.  My son and daughter can't see me when they see the camera and it's just not healthy for me." 

"Really?  There's no nuance there." 

"For some, yeah, but for me, none. And that's the thing.  There aren't any hard and fast rules for using and rejecting technology.   You set a rigid time limit on the pen pal networks and I don't take pictures." 

It has me thinking that maybe we're doing a disservice to students when we teach tech criticism as good versus bad rather than asking, "What is best?"  And perhaps we're doing a disservice to students when we teach, "What is best?" rather than "What is best for me in this current context?' 

Pencil Me In Is Here!

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Acceptable Use Committee

I made the mistake of joining the committee regarding the Acceptable Use policy of the district.

"We need kids to know about Pencil Predators."

"Oh, I heard about that.  They send notes to kids and then lure them in."

"Nice, what else?" our leader scribbles away at her tablet.  

"Teach kids not to tear the goddam paper," a man says.

"Please, these are Victorian times," a woman says.

"This is a the U.S.A.  I'll use whatever goddam language I choose.  Just add the part about tearing paper."

"What if the goal isn't acceptable?" I ask.

They stare at me blankly.

"Yeah, what if it's about being ethical instead?"

"Okay, well anymore ideas?" the woman says.

"I'm not done.  Why are we even here?" I ask.

"To craft an Acceptable Use policy."

"Yes, but numbers are used to marginalize people and we don't have an Acceptable Use policy for math.  And kids get hurt in P.E.  Where's the policy for that?  Then, there's language art.  If we're really serious about the art of language and the power words possess, why don't we have an Acceptable Use policy for that?  Come to think of it, people have been abusing science to justify Social Darwinism and history is often used to justify injustice.  So, why don't we create Acceptable Use policies for those subjects?"

The leader misses my point and says, "I think that's a brilliant idea.  I'll bring that back to my supervisor. We should have Acceptable Use policies for all subjects."

Or we could teach students to be ethical critical thinkers.

5 Reasons for Leaving the Pencil Conference

In the past, I've learned some neat things in the PIE Conference, including how to fold oragami, the wonders of colored pencils and how to use notebooking (yet another chance to turn a noun into a verb) for student learning.  This year, however, I left a day early.  I boarded the train and headed back to my wife and daughter and realized that I will grow more as a teacher spending a day with a two year old than with a crowded lecture hall full of experts.

Here are my reasons:

1. Many presenters I've met are unapproachable.  Yes, they give nice speeches, but I've been disappointed that some of the ones who claim to love all the social media tools are quick to shy away from using those tools for honest discussion and debate. "Hey, you should use a pen pal network.  But don't try and send me messages.  I'm much too important than that."

2. Many presenters are arrogant.  I can't listen to you if you are automatically the expert. I can't listen to you if you won't ask questions.  I can't listen to you if you are unable to share some of your difficulties.  If you believe that your job is to change me as a teacher, I'll kindly ask you to eff off and I'll listen to someone else.  News flash: just because you got yourself an Edison Projector and fancy new phonograph doesn't mean you are now the Pope of Paper.

3. Many presenters fail to grasp complexity, paradox and mystery.  It has to be about "their" way and in doing so they engage in tribalism and provocation for the purpose of sounding different.  It's like hanging out in a stuffy art house.  Don't talk about why we need to move past the one-room school house unless you are able to recognize that the one-room school house had a few redeeming qualities (multi-age classrooms, for example)

4.  Many presenters speak like addicts.  Yes, paper is flat and smooth and ultra-portable.  But save the addictive language for the opium dens.  If I want to feel coked-up, I'll stop by the drug store for a soda.

5. Many of the New School folks won't admit that there are some great ideas from the past - whether the idea is ten or two thousand years old.  That bothers me.  Innovation for the sake of innovation is novelty and ultimately it will eventually lose their luster.  Remember those Chester B. Arthur sideburns?  Yep, your phonograph might just be headed that way.

This by no means makes up all of the Pencil Education community.  I've found great people in plogs and on the pen pal networks.  However, I've also ran into my fair share of prima donnas that convince me that the conference circuit can all too quickly become a cute, glossy version of show and tell.  I don't mind show and tell, either.  But I need to to show me reality and tell me more than simply what I need to do to "fix" my teaching career.

Avoid Social Networking

The district office HR representative explains to us at the staff meeting, "From now on, teachers must avoid any site that allows for social networking with students."

"I can't believe this," Ms. Jackson says.  "I . . . I've volunteered in my church's youth group for years.  It seems that the best way to model appropriate adult behavior is to interact with kids and be a positive role model."

"No can do, Action Jackson! Churches can have creeps.  Do we want you to seem like a creep?"

"What about the grocery store?  I run into students at the grocery store all the time.  It can be a real network of social interaction."

"Nope.  You can be on the site, but you can't greet students. Just avoid eye contact and pretend that they don't exist."

"I coach baseball."

"Is it the school's team?"

"No."

"Then, you'll need to resign immediately."

"I'm a family friend of one of my students.  Her whole family has been over for dinner."

"That might be misconstrued as a date.  Just tell her family that you cannot be friends with them until their daughter is in college."

"But she's in the fourth grade!"

"Well, they'll have to take a rain check, then.  Any more questions?"

"Can it be an anti-social networking site?  I mean, can I go to a riot where my students might be attending? To me, that's pretty anti-social," I add.

"Good point.  We might need to revisit that.  Let's go to the Board with this.  Perhaps we'll simply pass a rule that you cannot interact with a student at all outside of school."

Image

"Mr. Johnson, are pictures more real than reality if we just forget reality after it happens anyway?"

"What do you think?"

"I think a picture is more real, since it doesn't change."

"What about memory?"

"Your imagination gets in the way of reality."

Imagination. Imaginary.  Root word: Image.

Imago.

Make believe.  Make belief.  

We are living in a world just beginning to shift from a print to an image culture.  We create imagery.  No, we capture imagery, letting imagination believe it is less important or less real or less true than the snapshot flash of a camera. 

But we also create images; spinning truth and reality to improve the image we try and maintain with the vain hope of masking our mortality.  

Graven images.

I spent an hour retouching a photograph I'll use in my pen pal network.  

It might capture reality, but I feel less real than I did an hour before when I broke bread with my wife and daughter.  (Okay, I had to break the bread into really tiny pieces for her, but it was still breaking bread)  When I share the sense of confusion in sketching out a pencil-based image of myself, my wife reminds me that it is human.

"Tom, we hide.  We stay out in the open.  We hide again.  Social context, language, clothing - these are all a part of the natural desire to create that element of self that we experience so deeply."

"It just seems like we lost something human in the process." 

"No, our technology, our tools, our language, culture . . . those are what make us human.  The need to develop an image is the root of imagination.  It's what makes us who we are.  It's pictographs on cave walls and hierogliphics on pyramids and stained glass on cathedral walls.  The tools might change, but the sense in which we create an image or capture an image and then call it reality . . . that is a part of what makes us human."  

My daughter paints a monster.  It's real, or at least it is real to her.  I retouch a photograph.  My wife quilts a blanket.  True, we might be moving toward an "image culture."  However, let's not kid ourselves.  We have always been image-based.  It's just that the tools change in how we express imagination.  Yet, whether we conjure up a new vision or try and rethink our public memory, it is always an act of imagination.  

Imagination.  Image.  Imago.

"Imago Dei," she reminds me as I slowly slide the air shudder and watch the silhouettes fade into darkness.  Even now, as I embrace her beneath our comforter, I am experience at once the empirical reality of her warmth and conjuring up images of that moment she walked down the aisle. Even when we are laid bare, in our most vulnerable moments, we are still bound by our images.

Tech Masks

"Sorry I'm late.  Some idiot in a horseless carriage cut me off and spooked my horse a bit," I tell Paul the Preindustrial Poet when we meet for coffee.

"I know what you mean.  I was cut off by a mustang this morning.  You know the type that a guy gets in his mid-life crisis.  I was walking down the street and he just cut me off."

"I guess I'm just in a bad mood.  Some anonymous guy wrote told me that I'm going to Hell."

"On your plog?"

"Yup."

"It seems like people use technology to hide.  It's like it becomes a mask.  Whether it's cutting you off in a horseless carriage or being vindictive in a plog or bumping their phonograph loud enough that the whole neighborhood hears.  They wouldn't cut you off in person or shout at you in a room or shout a song so loud that the whole city hears.  It's like the technology becomes a way to hide."

"Is it really masking anything?'

"What do you mean?"

"I understand that it's unpleasant.  I get that.  And I understand that people use technology to hide.  Or they forget the human side behind it.  But cutting people off, making mean comments and the like - isn't that simply a part of the human condition?"