This is  very old post that I failed to post until much later.

It is very odd to have a reader. I cannot imagine how anyone found this page, but someone did. And is following.

Hello.

for Camille, a Gary story

I have done a lot of stupid things in my life. I will tell on myself that I once kicked a car on a public street. It is only fair to myself to explain that I was crossing the street at the time, a block north of the Blue Moon Tavern in Seattle. The car drove in front of me. This would have been about 1974 and I was young. The car did not hit me or swerve toward me, but I hauled off and kicked it as it drove past. The driver stopped and yelled at me for it. Fair enough. I was not in a crosswalk, he said. But I was crossing at a corner, and pedestrians have the right of way.

Gary does not believe in kicking cars. He speaks respectfully to crows and ravens, doves and pigeons. As a childhood pigeon fancier, he is not overfond of raptors. If he had a choice, he would choose the robin over the hawk every time. However, he has been known to bark at dogs that make him uncomfortable. This is unsettling to dogs who recognize a challenge when they hear one. Sometimes the does not go as well as it might have, if Gary had kept his canine comments to himself. Still, he does not bite.

A year or two ago, we were driving home from our Post Office box in Cannon Beach. We entered highway 101 at Sunset, heading south. It is a scary entrance because visibility is poor and the merge lane is uphill and very short. My mother was in her mid-70s when she confessed she never looked before merging at that entrance. “They can just wait for me,” she said and giggled. That was when I realized I did not want my children in the car with her anymore. (They later confessed that her driving was sometimes frightening.)

Anyway, this one day Gary saw a car coming south on 101 and had to come to a complete stop to allow it to pass. The out of state driver in the car behind us was in a tizzy. He honked and drove up close behind. When we came to a full stop, he lost all patience. He pulled his car out onto the highway, swung around, managed to miss the car on the highway, but passed us. Then he stopped his car in the merging section of the highway right in front of us. Gary had the presence of mind to immediately put the car into reverse. He had backed up about thirty feet when the other driver got out of his car. He was driving a Quantum 45, Q45. I asked Gary just now because I don’t know cars well enough to remember.

So he stood on the pavement, his face twisted in anger.

“It’s a freeway, asshole!” the man shouted. There was a moment we were afraid he might charge at us or shoot us, but then he got back into his car and screeched away.

It was a frightening event. Both Gary and I were rattled and upset. “It’s not a freeway,” I muttered, “it’s a highway, asshole.” Then we were quiet the rest of the way home.

“It was partially my fault,” Gary says now. “I was in his way. If I hadn’t been in his way, none of that would have happened.” You’d have to know Gary to hear his voice.

Since then, the event has come up again and again. The driver of the car stopped behind us honked at us to move, in the Pearl District of Portland. We waited for the pregnant woman to push her baby carriage across the street (in a crosswalk, no less). A tailgater. A not-quite-stop at a Stop sign.

In those moments, one of us is bound to snort with a sort of hysterical glee. “It’s a freeway, asshole!” we shout.

And we laugh like the idiots we are.

Many recommend that writers maintain a presence on social media as a way to promote themselves and their work. Sometimes, too, it is seen as a way of supporting other writers. Facebook, blogging, twitter, Pinterest, Instagram. Do these and other methods of online communication foster genuine social interaction? After active participation for a decade, I am inclined to say: Usually not.

A peer from my MFA program first urged me to begin a blog because I was depressed as a result of life events, and I was not writing. For years after, I routinely posted links to my blog essays on FB. Many people clicked “like”, but by reviewing the stats on my blog, I knew almost no one was actually clicking the link, much less reading my blog. I was active on FB each day, but now less often. I wrote 1000 essays for myself online. Then I stopped, and I returned to the page.

My reviews on Goodreads took some of the weight off my need to correspond. I find that most of the people who have friended me read only YA rather than the more demanding books I choose. In fact, most do not read at all. They listen to audio books. Since I live in an isolated rural community, I hunger for writing peers. I do not find them there.

This new WordPress blog has only one essay, written just the other day. I have not bothered posting a link on FB because I know few will look at it even if I do. Author Allison K. Williams has something to say about good literary citizenship, and it mostly does not involve social media. I am grateful to FB for reconnecting me to people in my past, but I am less certain how, or if, social media supports me or anyone else as a writer.

Periodically, I suppose, I must reconsider.

Debate continues about use of laptops and phones in high school and colleges classrooms. Yes, why fight progress? Use them, say some. No, they are a distraction from the work at hand and normal human interaction, say others.

A post on Mind/Shift reviews the range of opinions. Derek Bruff is a mathematician and director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He first cites research that pen/pencil on paper is a more effective learning strategy than transcription. Then he offers a quite different strategy: “Getting students to collaborate and debate in small groups, for one thing. He’s also seen anecdotally that, ‘If you give students something productive and on-topic to do with their devices,’ it reduces idle browsing. He calls this the ‘Google jockey’ approach.”

I absolutely agree about the potential usefulness of devices for small groups. This is an excellent process when the goal is specific, the groupings are carefully planned, the teacher is both modeling the desired behavior and monitoring group progress, and the pace is too fast to allow for wandering off topic. Too often group work degenerates into socializing, which is probably not the goal. And with a device in hand, there is the temptation to check Facebook or phone messages. I have been in too many teacher-ed groupings with Think-Pair-Share elements that do virtually nothing for my understanding of material. These activities become more about theater than thinking and learning.

Where it works best in my experience? When students have already reviewed material and come together to figure out more than any one of them understands alone.

Everyone prepares (reads the same materials, studies the same videos, whatever), comes to class in small groups that remain stable for the duration of the class (they get to know the people in their groups), discusses the readings and propose a question (or three) for class discussion. These questions are written on the board and the instructor then reviews the relative usefulness of each, and with input from the class chooses a few for class discussion. There is a challenge here. Students must review the material in sufficient depth both individually and in small groups to discover the most valid (difficult, important, controversial) questions.

What does this have to do with allowing use of devices? Merely that tech is a convenient reference tool. Students research the text in a variety of ways in order to create context and stronger literal understanding of a text that is “over their heads” at first reading.

The catch is this is not how tech is used by students in or out of school. Accessing and using references is a discrete skill whether those references are books or accessed through phones. The skills are not automatically acquired and should be taught.

In my experience, even seniors in high school never use their devices as tools. They do not use indices in books and they skip the words they do not recognize in an essay rather than look them up on the device in their hands, even when a term is essential to understanding a text that they do not “get”. It is the work of a moment to review historical data, look up a key word, or find the credentials of a cited source. They must be taught to use their phones to do this.

That will be my task this week. I will will assign a complex text, ensure that the groups of three students bent over paper have specific tasks and a discover range of information and questions to bring back to the class and share.

Next term? I will do better.

I am starting over. My concerns here will be promises to myself, usually about professional goals or obligations as a teacher, writer, and artist.