I have been thinking about television.
Which seems like an odd place to start when I am actually thinking about my students…but here we are.
When I was growing up, there just weren’t that many choices. We watched I Dream of Jeannie and The Brady Bunch and later M*A*S*H and The Love Boat. Obviously not EVERYONE watched the same things, and I’m not suggesting that 1970s television was some golden age of thoughtful representation and excellent values. Yikes.
But we had a lot of stories in common.
We knew the same characters. We loved some of them and loved to hate others. Frank Burns could be awful and ridiculous and somehow, while we were laughing at him, we were also watching people negotiate arrogance and authority and prejudice and friendship and loyalty and kindness. Nobody had to announce TODAY’S LESSON IS EMPATHY. We just watched people bump into one another week after week.
And then we talked about it.
At school. At work. Around the dinner table.
There was some common cultural footing there.
I look at the teenagers sitting in front of me now and wonder what their footing is.
They are connected in a way my generation couldn’t have imagined. Gawd…how did 6 – 7 unite them…??? They have access to basically the entire world through something they carry in their pockets…although not during my class, thankyouverymuch. 😂
But they aren’t necessarily connected to the SAME world.
One kid’s internet is not another kid’s internet. Their feeds are shaped by what they click on and linger over and laugh at and search for. They can sit at the same table, be the same age, attend the same school…and consume completely different versions of the world.
And I know almost nothing about most of those worlds.
That gives me pause because I am supposedly preparing these kids for their future.
Ummm…what future?
I’m 61. They are mostly 14, 15, 16. Their adult lives will unfold in a world I will experience mostly as an older person. I am preparing them for something THEY will inhabit and I cannot possibly know.
That’s a little humbling.
But then I think about the things I DO know about the kids sitting in front of me.
Someone has a mom fighting breast cancer.
Someone is worried sick about a missing pet.
Someone is moving out of state….again. Can’t their parents just work it out?
Someone’s boyfriend broke up with her.
Oh.
I know those things.
Not their particular versions of them. Those belong to them. But fear that someone you love might not be okay? Missing something you love? Heartbreak? Leaving people behind? Feeling lonely in a room full of people?
I know something about those things.
Television didn’t create the human stuff underneath the stories we watched…and the internet hasn’t spared us from any of it.
Kids still fall in love and get their hearts broken. Parents still get sick. Pets disappear. Friends disappoint them. Families move. They still desperately want to belong and sometimes feel like they don’t.
Maybe the stories have changed. The stuff of the stories hasn’t.
And maybe I have been confusing shared culture with shared humanity.
My generation may have had more common stories through which to talk about being human. I’m not sure. Maybe television gave us characters and situations we could point to because everybody knew what we were talking about.
But these kids are still living the human stuff.
And maybe that’s part of what I’m doing when I try to build a classroom community. Gawd – is this too cliche?
Thirty-something kids walk into my room carrying thirty-something different lives. Different families. Different beliefs. Different interests. Different feeds. Different subcultures. Different ideas about what is funny or important or completely cringe.
They didn’t choose each other.
And they certainly didn’t choose the 61-year-old woman at the front of the room.
Yet here we all are.
Maybe we don’t find common ground.
Maybe sometimes we make it.
We play a ridiculous game together. Someone completely butchers a sign and we all laugh—including the person who butchered it. We struggle through an activity. Someone helps someone else. We have a conversation that takes longer than I planned. Something happens on Tuesday that is still funny on Friday.
Eventually we have stories that belong to us.
Maybe that’s one reason I care so much about the messy community-building stuff that doesn’t always look terribly efficient.
Because I don’t actually need my students to know Frank Burns.
And I don’t need to understand what the heck 6 – 7 means…
I do need to remember that the kid sitting across from me has an inner world I know very little about.
And somehow we have to learn to live together anyway.
Maybe that’s part of what public school still does extraordinarily well.
It puts us in rooms with people we didn’t select.
No algorithm decided we were compatible.
No one asked whether we shared interests.
Here are your people.
Figure it out.
Learn something together.
Try not to hurt each other.
When you do…repair it.
And maybe, somewhere along the way, create a few stories you have in common.
I don’t know.
I’m still wondering what we have in common if not the shared human experience because I don’t think the answer is in any kind of media.
