A Day In The Journey

I should be grading right now. Instead I'm spending time dumping thoughts into a blue-ringed rectangle. Awesome. At any rate, there are two things caroming around in my head. That's your vocabulary word for the day: caroming. It means to collide and bounce away, like billiard balls. Aren't you glad to learn that? I'm sure you'll use it as soon as you can. :-D Both things deal with education and resulting human ability to respond. Doesn't that sound exciting.

The first thing has been on my mind for a few weeks. It started with a friend's tweet regarding the way some people responded to a rather horrific event and was further fueled by a similar reaction on the part of a television audience to an unexpected and serious admission. In both cases, the response was highly inappropriate: laughter. A knee-jerk reaction to these responses would understandably be, "What's wrong with people? How can they find this entertaining or humorous? They must be inhuman or completely base." I do not think this is the problem at all. Bear with me as a tell an illustrative story. Back in my college World Drama class, we viewed a recording of a college performance of Cyrano de Bergerac. The performance was really quite good, and the duo scene of Cyrano and Roxanne in the convent garden was quite moving and tragic. Near the end of the scene, Cyrano leans against a tree. Being a stage tree, this tree was equipped with wheels. Unfortunately, the stage hand who had placed the tree failed to lock said wheels causing the tree to move a visible distance when Cyrano leaned against it. The audience, in the midst of this tragic, heart-breaking scene, responded with laughter. My World Drama professor proceeded to lead the class in a discussion of how emotionally immature audiences (in this case, about 85% required-to-attend college students) will often react with laughter when they have no idea what else to do. In other words, when we as humans are met with something emotionally unexpected, something for which we are unprepared, something we don't know how to process properly, we laugh. It isn't that we lack compassion, empathy, or humanity. It is that we lack tools to appropriately process emotionally heavy or embarrassing moments. Like a horrific event caught on video. Or an unexpected admission of moral and ethical failure. So what does this have to do with education? This: as high school classes and curricula have moved toward factual coverage of large quantities of material and catering of said material to only the experiences of the students, we have moved away from teaching them to think critically and process their responses to things outside of their experiences. Granted, you cannot teach emotionally maturity; that takes time and experience to fully develop. You can, however, teach students (using subject material to do so) how to understand, relate, and respond to both ideas and emotional reactions. By teaching them to think and ponder, we give them the tools to aid their emotional development as well. We can expect teens and college students to respond bluntly and immaturely to emotions they don't understand how to process yet. Part of becoming an adult, however, is learning how to respond, or not respond, to overwhelming emotions. Properly constructing pedagogy is a part of that process. If we as educators, parents, and mentors are not teaching these things, we are failing the next generation, not just personally, but socially, culturally, and politically, as well.

The second point is not fully developed in my mind, yet. It concerns the way we as Americans, as Westerners, too often find ourselves expecting to have things "personalized," and how our educational experience enhances or discourages this need to have every thing we own or do personalized. It isn't ready for press, yet, though. Therefore, you may considered yourself teased. :-P