bleckblog: musings of a community college english teacher

One of the books I'm using in an upcoming class, one that starts in a week, and one that is also a core-text for SFCC, is Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. I just started reading it for the first time today and will end up re-reading it with students, but it has given me pause to think about so-called new media and the role is has on teaching and learning, in my classes in particular.

In the first two chapters, which is all I have read, Postman says some interesting things, things that lead me to question what I do. But I guess that's a good thing. Postman's over-riding concern seems to be the demise of print influenced culture. As an English teacher, I'm with him on that, being that I'm fairly literate in that regard. I enjoy reading as much as the next person, maybe more. After all, I just finished a class where we read , Lolita, The Great Gastby, Daisy Miller, and Pride and Prejudice, all in 11 weeks of first year composition. My students, however, especially the lesser practiced readers, didn't enjoy the course nearly so much as, at least the reading part. Who knows about the writing part. So, like Postman, I lament the decline (if there is such a thing. I doubt I was much better a reader at the time in my education than my average students are/were).

Where I find myself in agreement with Postman, even though he wrote the text in mid-1980's, is that students, when it comes to television, movies or the internet is that "[the media's] role in directing what we will see or know is so rarely noticed" (11), that the metaphors employed by electronic (all?) media are "working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality" (10). I also have to admit that I'm typically in the same boat as my students here, that I don't pay a lot of attention to the manner in which reality is being constructed when I sit down to watch tv, which I don't do all that much, thankfully. But my six-year old is as much a fan of Spongebob, Clifford, Zaboomafu et al as any similarly aged child with access to cable tv and (occasional and monitored access to) the internet.

So, where am I going with this? I guess, following Postman, I would have liked to have mastered the printed word world before having to address the world of electronic images and manipulation. But I, and my students, don't really have that luxury in the early 21st century. Not only do I have to learn to better read what is coming at me through the screen, but I have to give students at least an introduction to the same thing, otherwise they will be largely illiterate. I also have to give them some practice in the production, not just the consumption, of electronic media. I just have to figure out how to do that.