Preterition

Today was a good teaching day with my sections of computer-lab first year composition. I’m happy to see the students, and I was grinning when I left campus. I like them a lot. And we got a lot done today, even though I overplanned, like I always do, and we didn’t get to everything I had in mind, so there’ll be plenty of overlap and catch-up time with the new add/drop students.

As I indicated yesterday, we did break up the activities, moving from individual writing to one-on-one peer interaction to individual writing to group sharing and discussion, back to peer work and individual writing. This back-and-forth is something, to me, that feels much more native to the computer classroom than to the paper-and-pen classroom. In the paper-and-pen classroom, a discussion or one-on-one peer work or small group collaborative writing can go on for the entire class session, but in the computer classroom, I always feel like I’ve got to mix things up and shift from task to task, and I wonder why it’s so.

Part of it, I think, is the instrumental demand of the machine; its whisper that “I am technological capital: use me, or you’re being wasteful.” These labs cost tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and there’s an always-implicit utilitarian imperative floating in the air there. (One semester, I co-taught a small course on reading and writing literature of the surreal and avant-garde; my co-teacher brilliantly suggested that – rather than writing strange things with the computers – we could write strange things to and about them.)

But another part of it is my fear of routinization. In a paper-and-pen writing classroom, the technologies of the writing implements are simultaneously infefficient and transparent, so that students’ intellectual labor, however sustained, seems to be in no danger of post-industrial Fordist or Taylorist routinization. But as soon as I get in a computer classroom, I see those machines, and I think part of me worries that if I see students staring too long alone into that blinkered computer monitor tunnel vision, they’ll become intellectual assembly-line workers, stamping out paragraphs, bolting them into themes, passing them down the line to quality control. So my impulse, however misguided, is to break up the imagined efficiency-fostering routine, because of the more overt presence of efficient modern technology. I think that maybe what I want is to make student writing troublesome and inefficient.

Is this a bad thing for a teacher to want?

Hm. Might bear further consideration, at the least. Tonight, though, I’m pooped, after not sleeping much last night (always that last-minute anticipation) and all the preparation and gear-up and last-minute emergencies and emotional energy of today. So I’m gonna take my boots off, stretch out, and unwind a little; play with Tink and Zeugma some, and be generally inefficient and unproductive.

I’m glad to be teaching again. God, I love this job.