One day, I’d like to write a short non-fiction book*, probably on education and technology, for reasons I will explain below, that cites and discusses only those essays I’ve taught for first-year college composition classes.
I’ve been teaching for a while, so I should have significant topical breadth and historical range to work with—consider the following: a condescending Brian Williams essay about how kids don’t read newspapers; an obsolete piece of techno-alarmism on Friendster’s effects on relationships; and a nifty four-page Thomas Friedman excerpt extoling, among other things, the “force multipl[ying]” effects of email.
If that weren’t enough, there’s always more just around the bend. Every few years, a new anthology comes along and/or is foisted upon instructors, according to the whims and prejudices of first-year writing directors**, adding to the stockpile of instantly obsolete takes on the breakneck changes of our fracturing world. And while these anthologies sometimes posture as radical departures from the snooze-readers of old, they rarely are, since textbook companies like to work with the most affordable copyrights possible, which means they prefer to put a newish spin on a batch of licensed texts to the sticker shock of content overhaul. This is especially true of literature textbooks, which, after you’ve been doing this a while, seem, in ensuing editions, not just populated by familiar names and faces, but haunted by them. I could, I used to joke, respond to the question “What do you do [for work]?” by saying, “I teach Death of a Salesman for a living.”
First year lit classes, at least where I teach, have been displaced by other modes and agendas. Basically, what used to constitute Comp 101 (expository and research writing) has been stretched on the rack of curriculum reform so that those materials and assignments comprise both Comp 101 and 102. But this just means: more non-fiction readers for me! And two of the most popular topics in these readers are, inevitably, education and technology, for obvious if superficial reasons: everyone in college is at least pretending to get an education and technology is, um, important. Remarkably, there tend to be few if any essays in comp books that synthesize*** ed and tech, which opens the field pretty wide for an aspiring author such as myself.
My motives in this project are twofold: 1) to conduct intellectual vandalism against texts and ideas I disdain and 2) to inventory the wonderless, recursive content of the writing-teacher’s life. But there’s a considerable side benefit to all this: my theoretical book would be only minimally distinct in topic and scope from mega-selling books by Olympian snores like Ezra Klein, David Brooks, and Malcolm Gladwell. The difference between a New York Times columnist turned author and a shitty lunatic engaged in the kind of prank maybe ten people across the country would find funny is, it turns out, exiguous. Or, to put it another way, the mainstream non-fiction bestseller’s MO is simply to extend a banal topic just beyond the mental endzone of first-year writing classes, for readers who just couldn’t get enough of that stuff to begin with. They are, in essence, Comp 103 books.
What would I say in my education and technology book? Probably that technology is disrupting the ways we learn and causing us to learn not only the wrong things, but the right things (reading) in the wrong ways (on scary internet computers). What should we do about this? Take some time to retreat from our handheld space-phones, join some bowling leagues, travel, chop wood, go on carriage rides, play football with no helmets, memorize Shakespeare, and vote for Mondale. If kids want to learn about the world, they can check out an atlas from their local lending library. If they want to have long-distance relationships, they can learn to scream.
The trick would be disguising the fact that my source materials hail from 800-page soporific doorstops called like READING, WRITING, THINKING or THE READING READER****. I could thereafter present myself as a sober navigator of the very best that’s been thought and said about education and technology, boinging around from Sherry Turkle to Thomas Friedman to Richard Rodriguez and back again, pretending some mix of serendipity and argumentative progress. The book would no doubt resolve in some simplification of dubious, un-replicated, and meretricious neuroscience that I gravely misunderstand much to my own benefit. I would call the book READING ALL ALONE AND SOMETIMES SCREAMING TO YOUR FRIENDS.
Einstein, I guess, said that “Goethe was the last person to know everything.” But Goethe didn’t teach comp, so how could he? However, Einstein does bring up a good point. It was once possible to act like you knew everything without sounding like Cliff Claven. (But, then again, what did Goethe know about, say, Japan? My guess is…next to nothing). The first-year composition reader is, if not entirely overrun by theme, constructed as though it’s the first book a young adult will want to read if they wish to someday know everything. This is the fatuous but misleading architecture of these books, which tend to offer snapshots of big if tenuous ideas, as though to say, “There’s more where that came from”—while more just means more…Thomas Freidman. Such meager and fun-less intellectual scavenger hunts offer little benefit to the student, but what happens to the instructor when they work and think primarily about these 101 texts, when they live, that is, in the banality of permanent introduction? Comp teachers, especially the busy and tired, live out this experiment every day, drawing on vanishing reserves of prior schooling and knowledge, as essays about FOMO replace footnotes in their yellowing theses.
I don’t worry about this too much, since, as I’ve explained before, I’m mostly made up of couch-potato bullshit from the 80s and 90s. Not one of the thousands of books I’ve read could ever spackle over my fundamental media-drenched brain flaws. I’m quite over the utopian prospects of self-education and self-improvement. There are certain words I’ve looked up dozens and dozens of times (I’m too vain to furnish examples), and which I will have to look up for the rest of my life if I want to know, for a day or two at a time, what they mean. Those are just the breaks. But there is a deeper disfigurement, an erosion of self and soul that derives from teaching and thinking about bland faux-serious think pieces*****, year after year, which must be confronted. Forgetting these wan texts and their tepid ideas, weirdly, is not an option. They crowd around; they hover over real ideas and impose their simplicities. Great books on ed and tech inevitably remind me of bad-to-mediocre 101 articles about the same things.
It must be nice to get rich off explainer-ese oversimplifications of trendy social science, to write a book so forcefully unobjectionable that it one day gets excerpted in some hopeless anthology meant for students who can read but would rather not (Neil Postman, one of the better 101 authors you’re likely to encounter, calls this “aliteracy”). But that’s not my fate. In fact, it’s hard to imagine ever writing a book, since I’ve forsworn self-assigned homework and prefer, by a wide margin, farting around. But the temptation to use writing as defacement is strong. I’d like to chew up the gum of the 101 cannon and stick its gross denatured corpus under the desk of history for at least one future schmuck in the back of the class to stickily discover. Lazy as I am, I’ll probably just watch the clock and daydream about the time when school is over for good, waiting for that last bell to ring, and wondering if that is what I really want.
__________
* Perhaps under a different pseudonym.
** The real problem here is the compulsory textbook—those assigned to instructors by micro-managing senior personnel.
*** Which is odd, since synthesis is a prominent modality, or type of essay, presented and dissected in many of these books.
**** These things cost a fortune btw. One of the worst I ever used, a customized MacMillan composition textbook, 1/3rd the size of the original, went for 100 dollars. Its inhouse nickname, thanks to yours truly, was The Dogshit Reader.
***** The essays I have in mind tend to bother me in one of three ways: they 1) burnish their reactionary elitist disdain for mass cultural changes with techno alarmist nostalgic intellectual handwringing or 2) take a stupidly optimistic stance toward technological change or 3) blame some social ill on cognitive shortcomings and/or technological change while ignoring or downplaying corrupt capitalist influences on said social ill.