Columbia Greene Community College Media & Society Hudson Valley Kevin Malone Flint Michigan Water Situation Governor Snyder Detroit Teachers’ Sick Out
It is Monday evening and I am home, safe and sound. I taught my first full class today and I survived. I had a good time and they seemed to have a good time, thank God.
One student told me he had been advised to take by his advisor and he was not happy. I think he is happier tonight. There is a young man who sits to my right when I am facing the classroom, quiet and withdrawn. I will have to work on him as one-fifth of his grade depends on engagement in the class. He has a heavy air about him.
Anyway, I was relieved. I had a good time. It’s been 35 years since I was in charge of a class and I was afraid I had lost my touch. Not yet, I hope.
The sunset tonight was pinkish so I am hoping for a good day tomorrow. I stayed in the Hudson Valley where there is no snow, forsaking the city while it works to dig itself out. My nephew, Kevin, will be in the city, I think, Wednesday and Thursday and, if his schedule permits, we will get together.
He is finishing his law degree and will be joining a law firm in DC that specializes in medical issues which is where he has been working for the last four or five years. He is an extraordinary young man and I am extraordinarily proud of him.
Not proud I am of the Flint, Michigan water debacle. What happened that lead found its way into the water supply? What a tragedy… It’s being called “economic racism” by some. In the same state a Judge has refused to stop a “sick out” of Detroit teachers who are protesting things like vermin carcasses in the schools along with black mold.
Any wonder they’re upset?
Governor Snyder of Michigan shouldn’t look for a national post anytime soon, methinks. Really! What was this about? Abandoning the poor and desperate? What state did he think he was Governor of?
I might go on a rant here about what are we doing? How can the Governor of Michigan ignore what is going on in Detroit, once the jewel in the crown of that state?
How was it that his administration chose to mock reports of bad water in Flint?
I am confused. Is this not government failing?
Yes, I think so.
A Republican Governor in Minnesota did not support maintenance of infrastructure and a bridge collapsed there. He is not the current Governor.
Governor Snyder of Michigan ignored, it appears, reports that Flint’s water had gone bad. How can one morally not investigate? How?
I am angry tonight. And I am carrying forward the anger that I heard from students today about issues like this.
It was pleasantly surprising that they are more outward focussed than I thought they might be.
Interesting days, these…
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From New York 05 09 2016 Thoughts on the last day of teaching…
May 9, 2016For 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.
Tags:CGCC, Claverack, Columbia Greene Community College, Google, Hudson, Hudson River, Mat Tombers, Mathew Tombers, Media and Society, New York, nomophobia
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