Old Dogs & New Tricks

It is a rarely stated but undeniable fact that one major distinguishing features between “cool teachers” and “lame teachers” is their ability (or willingness) to keep up with the times, both in pop culture and in technology. When I was in high school, the features that marked this technological distinction were things such as whether teachers used overhead projectors or used powerpoint; whether they put a contact email or a phone number on their syllabus; whether they showed movies in class or only lectured; whether they owned a cell phone or didn’t.

I remember sitting in Mr. Thomas’ 7th period Physical Science class, watching him and his high-waisted khakis write on the clear overhead projector slides with a dry erase marker, and listening to him bemoan the good ‘ol days of old fashioned respect and honesty and hard work. I remember that we weren’t allowed to type out assignments for his class unless they were longer than a certain number of pages, and I remember that when we wrote our report on one of the elements, we weren’t allowed to use any online sources at all – only books.  I remember that he didn’t listen to music with electric guitars in it, and that he owned a complete copy of the Encyclopedia Brittanica (an edition from sometime in the late 70s or early 80s, if I’m not mistaken), which he kept it on a massive bookshelf that ran along the entire back wall of the classroom, where it loomed, taunting us for our ignorance.

Even stronger than all of these concrete memories is the memory of how I felt in that classroom. Setting aside the fact that it would have been much more useful for us to learn how to seek out up-to-date scientific information than to spend class periods pouring over the encyclopedia, I remember simply not liking Mr. Thomas very much – a fact which made it very difficult to learn from him. Mr. Thomas felt outrageously out-of-touch, as if there was no plane of existence on which he and I could relate to one another. More than anything else, though, I didn’t like Mr. Thomas because I perceived that he didn’t like me. The fact that he verbally identified me as one of his favorite students didn’t quite stand up against the fact that he hadn’t seen or read or frequently even heard of any of the books, movies, shows, or music that my adolescent heart felt so passionately about — or, worse yet, that he often expressed contempt for the ones he had heard of. The fact that he would call on me often in class meant little in the face of the knowledge that I was a part of the delinquent generation of young people who only cared about texting and IM and MTV and sex and MySpace and skinny jeans and skateboarding and all other evil things. I remember feeling kind of bad for him when someone in class would make a sarcastic joke rooted in pop culture, and he would greet our chorused laughter with the confused blank stare of someone who is always left out of the joke. I remember looking at Mr. Thomas and being genuinely baffled that someone who spends so much time with teenagers could live on such an utterly and completely distant planet from them.

It was not until this past year or so that I began to realize that I actually face the legitimate risk of becoming one of those out-of-touch teachers myself. (This realization probably made me feel older than anything else ever has.) Interacting with my 14-year-old sister Amanda constantly reminds me how quickly digital technology and pop culture change — even though, at 25, I am younger than any of Amanda’s schoolteachers, I fear that I may have more in common with them than I do with her in terms of digital literacy! This may be an exaggeration, and I hope it is. But I am genuinely staggered at the gap between her digital abilities and my own, and, additionally, by the extent to which I am just totally not up on what is cool these days. While pop culture may seem like a random thing to bring into this discussion, I believe it’s relevant; after all, it’s amazing (and a little depressing) how much my lack of appreciation for One Direction and Adventuretime impedes my abilities to relate to my sister, especially when you compare me to my 19-year-old sister Aubrey, who is well versed in both of these topics and thus shares a large number of interests and inside jokes with Amanda.

I think there is something weirdly, deeply significant about a teacher’s ability to relate (or, at the very least, to make an attempt to relate) to the contemporary pop culture that their students care about, as well as to strive to gain skills in current digital technology and incorporate them in the classroom. The older we get, the more work this will take. But if you think about it, as teachers, we will have the massive advantage of spending time with dozens of young people every day. If we learn to value their expertises and interests instead of belittling them, and learn from them instead of just talking at them, I venture to suggest that we will greatly lessen our risk of becoming the Mr. Thomases of the future. :)