My world consists of half-faces.
I do not know what my students look like. Each kid is a pair of eyes, nestled underneath a head of hair and unkempt eyebrows.
I’ve never lived in a world of half-faces, have you? Now that it is becoming almost second-nature to see strangers in masks or covered by a shirt or sleeve, it becomes absurd to think of any persons’ face as whole anymore.
But what happens when you are meeting for the first time? When students and teachers meet each other, we know that we will spend lots of time together. And when that time passes, you forget about how little we actually know about each other. Down to the most sensory of actions.
Last year, I could tell you which of my students was daydreaming, by expression alone. Now, I must resort to even more subtle clues– a glance away, a vacant stare… although that look can be deceiving in a classroom. Some students really just look like that
Teachers are more attentive now than ever. We see more, we focus more, we pick up on non-facial social cues because those are all we have.
Education is evolving into a world never seen before. More computers, more apps, more screens– all in the classroom. Generation Z, both mine and my students’ generation are uniquely intertwined with this new world of technological satiation. I think my fingers will stay perpetually poised in QWERTY.
Teaching from a screen is different, although not difficult overall. The basics, programs I’ve used in college myself, are relatively simple to learn and easy to navigate, if you know where to look. In essence, all websites and softwares are fundamentally created the same. Similar interface, same navigation systems, many even use the same color palette (why do you think all our communication apps are blue?). We are mere pawns at the wills of the powerful and scary Silicon Valley moguls… the global generalizations of our lifetime.
The way in which we’ve grown into technology is interesting to think about. I say that intentionally– we as a species did not grow with technology, or else humans would have already developed telepathy and intergalactic space travel. Real intergalactic space travel.
And yet, here we are, no more evolved than we were centuries ago, perhaps even a little less. I think those that survived the Bubonic Plague, or slavery, or the British empire, had just a bit more genetic fortitude than the humans of today.
My classroom feels like another dimension. I’ve spent more time setting up my online class than for the physical. My students see me from a screen, or they only see half my face. One of my students, a girl who was caught watching drama tutorials in my class already, almost keeled over when she saw me remove my mask for a sip of water.
A room of half-faces does not a classroom make. Neither does lecturing from a screen, but I digress.
However, and let me be clear– although my students are learning this “new normal” as we adults have so aptly called 2020, not much has changed in terms of their understanding of the world. Although this change has been drastic for adults that would regularly go out for drinks, or take walks at the park, many of my students are not strangers to staying and and staying on their phones or staring at a screen.
Before the Year of Distance, we (myself included) were chastised for staying on their phones all the time, but these rants didn’t get very far. This is likely because older generations, from young Millenials to our great-grandparents, were doing the same. The world was on screens, and we didn’t think too much of it.
Now fast-forward to today. I teach an entire class of students online (I also teach two classes in-person, but that’s a monologue for another day). I have never met them, nor have I had one-on-one conversations with most of them. Although they are not half-faces, they are pixels on a screen, a combination of 1s and 0s where a child should be.
Eerily enough, this reminds me of a story I taught in class last year. Written in 1951 by Isaac Asmiov, this short story takes place in a world much like ours day, where children read books from computers and paper is scarcely used in education settings.
The main character, a young girl named Margie, couldn’t fathom a learning environment in which there wasn’t a robot doing the teaching. She was shocked to learn about physical books and real teachers when her grandfather told her about a time long, long ago.
What I can’t seem to shake now is a quote Margie said in the story: A man can’t know as much as a teacher.
What is a teacher? Are we man, or machine? Are we merely bots, meant to manufacture tiny working bots that will go on to create other working bots, or are we data collecting agents for test scores and standardization?
I believe I am neither. I am here to help young people think for themselves-- to push them to see the world in a perspective uniquely their own. If we cannot do that, then what is a teacher?
And so I say, what fun we had! The joys of full faces, of wholeness. The satisfaction of interaction! I yearn for it, and hope, one day, to gain it back. Before we forget what we stood for before we were merely eyes nestled underneath brows.
