For the first time in a week, the sun is out and the day feels spring like. Sunlight glitters off the Hudson River as the train I’m riding heads south to the city. I have a couple of meetings this afternoon and tomorrow and then will head back north after the last one is completed.
Today, I gave the final to my class. Once they’re graded and handed in, I am finished unless I am asked back in the fall.
It was genuinely hard for me to see my students go. I will honestly miss them, even the reluctant ones among them.
They are all interesting characters and I worry about them because most of them are graduating and their academic skills are less, for the most part, of what I would expect of students finishing their second year of college.
They range in age from twenty to forty. One is a mother who missed a couple of classes because she went to her own daughter’s graduation. Another is a vet, who is back after years of service, a man of thirty something who carries weight in his soul.
They follow Facebook and spurn Twitter. Instagram and Snapchat are their social media of choice.
No one remembers anything. They turn to their phones for the answers for anything and everything. As has been posited, if you can Google, why remember it?
Today was the first time they were not nose to nose with their phones. Their phones rarely leave their hands and if they have left it behind someplace, they are a shot out the door to retrieve it.
One of my tasks was to teach them to be better, smarter consumers of media. I challenged them to go a day without media. The one who came closest, went out to a farm and stayed there and even he couldn’t make it the full twenty-four hours.
The rest of them barely made it more than a few minutes. All have a better understanding of how pervasive contemporary media is.
Anxiety is apparent when they are separated from their phones, even for relatively short periods of time. When I threatened to remove a phone from one my students as she wouldn’t stop playing with it, I was greeted by genuine terror in her face.
Most of them suffer a higher degree of nomophobia [anxiety of being separated from your smartphone] than I had expected. The older they were, the less it was, the younger they were, the higher the degree. It was both fascinating and a little unsettling to observe.
Many of them write as if they were texting and some, to my great concern, have almost no skill in writing at all. I mean zip. And while they have more than moderate intelligence, they lack the skills to communicate their intelligence in writing. One of the smartest people in my class in native intelligence is incapable of getting his thoughts on paper. How can I not worry about him?
Most of them have an appalling lack of historical knowledge in general. They live in an ever constant present, skimming the waves of history, passing over it rather than through it. And what happened centuries ago is something which seems irrelevant to them. As I’ve mentioned, if they need to know about an event, they can Google it. [A disturbing tendency I have found in myself.]
Major device for connecting to the internet? The phone, of course. Most video viewing done? On the phone. Music consumption? On the phone. Everything is on the phone.
I am convinced they came away with a better understanding of how to approach and interpret media as they experience it and I am glad I have helped make them, please dear God, better consumers of media, less open to manipulation, more discerning, more interpretive because they really weren’t when they came into class.
I am afraid that is the case of many students today, at every level.
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From New York 05 30 2016 Memorial Day thoughts from the Vineyard…
May 31, 2016A dense fog is beginning to settle on Edgartown harbor after a wet, chill day; rain pummeled down in sheets for a time and then there was the damp aftermath. I was delighted that I had thought to bring a sweater with me to the bookstore.
There was a steady stream of customers through the store and while it didn’t seem busy, when we closed out we had had a rather good day, he said, sounding like a shopkeeper.
I have a whole new respect for people who work in retail. I have always attempted to be nice to them. I will work even harder.
One elderly lady was in the store, with her daughter I think. My colleague, Stav, took care of them. Her credit card said her name was Gimbel and he asked if she was any relation to the department store Gimbels? And they nodded and said yes, they were.
It was Gimbel’s Department Store in New York that started the Thanksgiving Day Parade, watched by millions every year, now the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. But back when they made the original “Miracle on 34th Street” it was Gimbel’s that was making the parade.
Gimbel’s and Macy’s were both sold to Federated at some point and they phased out the Gimbel’s name in the 1980’s. The daughter said that no one young remembers them but Stav is younger than me by far and he remembered them.
Macy’s was the child of Isidor Strauss, who went down on Titanic with his wife, Ada. She would not be parted from her husband as the ship was sinking.
There are several memorials to their love in New York, most famous is the small park near 106 and Broadway, by which I have often walked.
It is Memorial Day and I don’t want that to go unnoticed. I thought about it when I was swinging, at last, out of bed today. I went to bed early last night, incredibly tired and slept long, having wild murder mystery dreams. [One of the things Joyce asked me to do was make suggestions for new mysteries to order…]
It is Memorial Day and I was thinking of all the men and women who have served the US in all its wars.
And always, on Memorial Day, I think about Greg Harrison, with whom I went to high school. Older than me, he enlisted in the Army after high school and died in some rice patty in Viet Nam.
He was a gentle soul. He once teased me about something and when he realized he had touched a chord that hurt, became protective of me. And I remember him every Memorial Day. I went to his funeral in Minneapolis and could not comprehend he was not with us anymore.
I still cannot quite comprehend that he is not with us anymore. I still remember the moment when he realized the tease hurt me. He had not meant to and after that, he was very good to me.
When this day comes, I mourn him. And will, until I die.
I am not in Minnesota and so cannot bring flowers to my parent’s graves; my brother does that, thankfully, as he does to our Uncle Joe, who was the most important father figure in our lives. Our father was a reticent man, not much given to social interchanges. Uncle Joe, however, was, and living next door to us, embraced us all.
When I was twelve, my father died and Uncle Joe did his best to be the best uncle he could be to me. He loved all his nieces and nephews and did his best to be fair and generous to us all.
He is remembered, too, this Memorial Day.
In the meantime, politics plunges on toward whatever end. I am weary and wary, fearful and fretful and it will be what it will be. And when I return from my summer sojourns, I must do what I can to see Trump is not the next President.
Ah, fog envelops the harbor. At this moment, no boats at anchor can be seen. Time for dinner, a little time and then to sleep, perchance to dream…
Tags:Donald Trump, Edgartown, Edgartown Books, Gimbel's, Greg Harrison, Hillary Clinton, Isidor & Ida Strauss, Macy's, Martha's Vineyard, Mat Tombers, Mathew Tombers, Memorial Day, Obama
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