(5/2008) - In my sixteenth year of headship and in my eighth at Oakwood, I have been granted a new and different view of our school and our students. I have returned to my roots in the classroom and have become a part-time English teacher. I meet my 14 eighth grade students four times each week and, like my teaching colleagues, I assign homework, give quizzes and tests, read essays, and write progress reports on each student several times during the year. My classroom is bright with natural light; the desks are arranged in a circle around the perimeter of the room, and it is home to the Middle School Library.

Sixteen years ago when I last taught on a daily basis, my classroom looked very much the same. But my students’ world was very different. Internet research was very limited. Most of my students word-processed their essays, I typed my progress reports on an IBM Selectric. None of my students had a cell phone, nor did I. Emailing documents and text messaging with cell phones were unknown to us and digital cameras were primitive and certainly not contained within phones. Facebook and MySpace did not exist. The idea of posting text or photos of oneself on the Internet was entirely foreign.

Now, my students are entirely comfortable with the array of technology that has become a natural part of their lives. Several of them bring laptops to class each day and every one of them has a cell phone. Many of my students email me their essays rather than giving them to me in paper form and they are all familiar with taking digital photographs and making simple videos. They know how to share files and how to post on the Internet. They communicate regularly by electronic means — with their friends, their families, with their teachers. They are sophisticated consumers of technology in every respect and they understand it and relate to it far more easily than I. Immediate access, immediate communication, immediate visual, and aural feedback have become the norm for them and they are uncomfortable with anything less.

What does all of this mean for an eighth grade English teacher? Literature is a “slow” subject. It is subtle and nuanced. It often rewards re-reading. Exploring its structure involves asking questions, reading closely, and examining individual words and phrases in relation to one another. It often involves examining the roots of individual words and the ways they have been used in multiple contexts. Great writing, whether fiction, poetry, drama, or non-fiction prose, takes time to read and to absorb. Similarly, the best student writing takes time to be developed, revised, edited, and proof-read; it is entirely different in substance and in form from text messaging or email exchanges. In certain fundamental ways, the speed and agility of technology are at odds with the subject I teach.

It is my challenge each day to find ways to bridge this divide. I want my students to read slowly and closely and I want their curiosity to be engaged. Yet I don’t want them to lose interest — they are, after all, accustomed to rapid interactions in almost every area of their lives. I don’t want them to see literature as irrelevant to their own teenage identities. I know that it is essential for them to write expository essays and to develop the ability to write lucid, well-organized prose, to express themselves with clarity and conviction. At the same time, I strive to treat them as experts in their own fast-paced world — experts in the constantly evolving forms of communication and exposition and self-presentation that technology allows.

I have asked students to collaborate on an editing project by sharing electronic files. I have experimented with asking students to present their work in the form of electronic dialogues, videos, and pod casts. I have asked students to imagine how the presence of technology might have changed the plot line in a work of fiction or how computers might affect the way writers approach their craft. In all of this, I strive to encourage students to step back from themselves to look at communication and literature in its many forms with a detached perspective and to understand that their view of reading, writing, and the creative act grows from the particular lens of their own experiences.

Yet in spite of the revolution in technology, my eighth graders remind me in many respects of those I taught in 1978 in my first job as a teacher. My students are bright, inquisitive, both mature and immature (sometimes within the span of five minutes!), concerned about learning, concerned about their place in the social order, and striving to form authentic selves and life-long values. They are detaching from their families while simultaneously feeling great attachment to them. They bring their whole selves to school each day and they are extraordinarily complex young people living in a rapidly evolving culture. To my English classroom, they bring a readiness to examine important questions about how we communicate with one another, how we envision our lives through literature, and how we express what is fundamental in human nature. This is their great gift to a teacher.