“We are halfway there.”parable of the sower” by Octavia Butler, and we have reached a crucial turning point in the plot. The main character, Lauren Olamina, loses her family and home in an arson attack. I wanted my students to fully experience the severity of this loss, so instead of continuing with a workshop model I had been using it throughout the unit so far, so I decided to read it to the class:
I sat where I was for three exhausting and terrifying hours. Nothing happened to me, but I could see and hear things happening. There were people moving around the hills, sometimes silhouetted against the sky as they ran or walked over the hills… I heard a lot of gunshots, single shots and short bursts from automatic weapons…
“Why are we reading this?” a student interrupts. The class remains silent. I look up and see most of them resting their hands on their heads. They seem bored and look at me with dejected faces. I see some start to turn their phones around and others put their hands in their pockets.
“Because it is important. “This world is not that far from ours,” I say.
Another student responds, “But it's not that bad.”
“But what if one day it is?” asked. “You don't think you care about that?”
Another student shrugs. Another stares at me blankly.
The Parable of the Sower was written in 1993, but some would say Butler's predictions are chillingly accurate. Unfortunately, none of that matters if all students want to do is get back to their phones.
For many of my students, reading is not a precursor to revolutionary action, but rather a cumbersome task that is always the preamble to another tedious evaluation. Even if this is the case, The reading has been shown. be a tool to build empathy. Empathy This is how we learn to care for people we will never meet. In this case, the convenience of technology has created a sense of immediate gratification that runs counter to the empathy that reading can cultivate.
When I talk to my coworkers about the apathy I notice in my classroom, we realize that Butler's great writing, big words, and complexity of ideas discourage our students. When students simply come across a page that has a lot of words, disinterest is immediate.
I recognize that it is not my place to reflect their complacency, but rather to model what it would be like to care. But how can I get them to care when I can't even get them to see the value of a book that clearly shows us the effects of our collective negligence? It is impossible to achieve this empathy that reading can provide without first helping students gain tools to develop the mental and emotional resilience necessary to interact with complex texts.
Develop boredom and executive functioning
While people are not yet roaming the streets en masse looking for food and water, around the world people are doing just that. as I write this. In our country, our democracy is also at stake. Despite all this, Generation Alpha He cares less and less.
Lately, it seems like students are more interested in quickly scrolling through their friends' stories, checking their likes and direct messages, and uploading stories with filters to social media apps. Your impulses are programmed to do this and, in my opinion, focus too much on self, the immediacy of tasks, and the imminent gratification of likes; this does not allow students to sit deeply and meaningfully in another person's emotions and experiences.
Students will reach for their phones during transitions, between reading passages, whole group discussions, and during moments of boredom. While removing the phones is a first step, this does not solve the problem: immediate removal in the face of dense and complex text. Reversing these trends requires students to engage in the practice of boredom.
Boredom, despite the negative connotations, is a discipline that frees the mind from the perceived need for constant activity and Research shows that doing nothing can spark inspiration, imagination, and presence. Boredom is a feeling that students need to learn to befriend in order to tackle a complex text, because being bored should not be a reason to miss out on a thought-provoking reading experience like that offered by “Parable of the Sower.”
Boredom must be practiced daily and explicitly in classrooms. Set a timer and simply sit with your students. Put away phones and don't leave anything on the desk. Sit there. Don't do anything. This trains the mind to reject any impulses and seek distractions from the present moment.
In my classroom I have implemented sustained silent reading (SSR) without comprehension assessments to build reading resistance and help students find a genuine love of reading. Like boredom, this practice also requires silence and presence. Although a student's mind may wander during this time, the expectation that they remain silent and interact with words requires self-regulation.
Boredom and RSS are also related to executive functioning because they require students to be present, focused, and control their impulses. When students are only allowed to sit in class and think their thoughts or look at a book, it is a necessary first step to reading dense texts because reading requires concentration. Over time, the impulse to pull out the phone or withdraw from difficult tasks is expected to mitigate as students have learned that being bored or sitting still isn't such a bad thing.
Going down to read
To be honest, most days I feel helpless. Even when there are no phones, the disconnection persists. And in a sense, the disconnection is incredibly valid: despite all the activismThere are few changes for students to hold on to. If a young person sees the gaps between social movements and the continued fracture of our world, it makes sense to give up and focus on themselves.
Some of my solutions have been to combine parts of the “Parable of the Sower” with local and current events. In the Bay Area, poverty rates are extremely high with the rising cost of living. In San Francisco, Homelessness has long been a crisis.. The wealth gap is immense and we have seen the effects of climate change with extreme heat in parts of the Bay. Through my efforts, I have been able to help students see the correlations between these harsh realities and the circumstances of Lauren's world. But even then the apathy persists.
“What's the point? The world is going to end anyway,” they tell me.
And if it were true that the world would end, there would still be a period after the collapse of society when the only thing we would have left would be each other. Then it will all come down to empathy and community. When Lauren finally manages to build her community, she tells them:
…If we are willing to work, our chances here are good. I have some seeds in my backpack… What we have to do right now is more gardening than farming. Everything will have to be done by hand: composting, watering, weeding, collecting worms or slugs… We work together, we can defend ourselves and we can protect the children. The first responsibility of a community is to protect its children, those we have now and those we will have…
Although the work of building a community is daunting, as Lauren says, we must protect our children. They will bear the brunt of a broken world. We protect them by providing them with the necessary tools to survive. Empathy is the tool to survive in a world marked by individualism, but empathy cannot be practiced without poor impulse control. Empathy requires discipline, and discipline comes from facing and befriending discomfort.
In my ideal classroom, students are present, reading the words and forming connections with themselves and the world. They struggle to tackle dense paragraphs. They score. They may struggle, but they appreciate the long process of learning and understanding. They leave thinking of a world with expanded horizons because they have just experienced a life that is not their own. But the presence that leads to this empathy will only occur if the student self-regulates enough to manage the impulses that create the disconnection. If a student thinks that all answers should come immediately from a single tool in their hand (their phones), disengagement is inevitable.
But I know that while I'm in the classroom, my duty as a teacher is to model caring and empathy, regardless of my frustrations. I still take comfort in that student who will see the value in reading a novel that tells us who we will become if we forget each other, because if we don't have each other, we have nothing.
