Slowly, Intentionally

I admire my father-in-law, the Karate blackbelt. He knows how to sit, to meditate.

None of my kids know how to sit, period. They can squirm, and they can run, but they only stop moving to sleep (well, and sometimes to veg out in front of the television if I am not there to police their activity).

We watched a great documentary in my English class, PBS's Frontline piece, Digital Nation. One alarming claim of the film is that we are going so fast, so frantically busy, that we are not learning deeply and fully any more.



I wonder about this. I worry about this. I mean, here I am a proponent of all-things-digital, yet maybe I'm doing the students a disservice? Maybe I'm corrupting my own children, too?

Maybe I'm just enamored with all this digital stuff because it's shiny. Novel. Fun. It would be a terrible thing if I had fallen for the trap, fallen down the rabbit hole, and found myself swimming in the Kool-aid. (BTW: it was actually Flavor-Aid, for the record.) Ugh. If all these bells and whistles--which to me seem to streamline and improve research and writing--if they're really making us more shallow, then, like, wow.

Honestly, I do see the potential for immediately gratifying content to corrupt us. I know that I've even wanted to Google the whereabouts of my own keys (or on a true absent-minded professor day, my car itself). It's easier not to think, to just have access, but to really access the content I'm attempting to lead students into, one must think. One must be patient and diligent. I am now struggling with the question of whether or not this can be taught. Can one teach patient research to anxious youth? Can one teach a struggling community college student to let go of everything else and simply think a while? Can they let go of dollars and cents, familial woes, pressures of school, work, and family--just to entertain an idea? Can they feed that idea and take it for a walk? Can they roll around a word on the tongue just to feel it at play?

Some days I am not so sure.