Learning to Write/Learning to Breathe
How do we treat students like humans while they interact with machines?
Are you, reader-awaiting-the-holidays-during-a-pandemic-surge, feeling stressed? Maybe now you are.
Sorry for reminding you (what, you forgot?) that it’s 2020.
I’d like to help.
Please, play along.
Hold up your left hand like you’re going to give me a high five (remember those?). Really. Do it.
Now, take a deep breath. Use your right index finger to trace along the edges of your hand, like you used to trace it to make hand turkeys (go ahead; think about how nice it is to make a hand turkey, if you want).
While you trace, think about slowly inhaling and exhaling. I am elfin, and it takes me about two breaths to get around my fun-size hands. It might take you three breaths, or one if you belong on the Shire.
Just go slowly and breathe.
Welcome to my writing class, where you need to be alive to write. You might be shocked to learn that you need to breathe to live. I am today years old when I connected the idea of writing and breathing. Maybe you are too.
In person, not online like you and I are now, I karate chop and huzzah my way across my classroom, cajoling and shaking loose ideas from students with the joyus cackles of a madwoman. I like teaching.
After spending the last decade or so rocking from my toes to the balls of my feet while gassing up timid freshmen, everything slowed into stay: stay at home, stay safer, stay six feet apart, and stay engaged during this process.
The quiet spiraled from shocking to numbing with dizzying speed. I grieved the loss of the orderly energy and productive chaos of a classroom.
Then, relief! The wonderful opportunity presented itself to research writing assistance technologies through the National Writing Project and UCLAWP, my local Writing Project.
For the first time, each student in my class has a computer. We can do all of the digital things! I will have audacious hope in the face of innumerable tragedies of 2020 (which, to list, would make this ah-ha article nearly unreadable).
I had a plan: We’ll check our grammar using Artificial Intelligence while making sassy comments about this brave new world we’re entering and selling our souls (data) to join. We’ll laugh and laugh and laugh and write masterpieces. Oh, the free time we’ll use! Oh, the learning!
She said.
Students returned to “school” in the fall, if anything, worse for the wear. A teacher remarked, “I had to re-teach Google.” All the heads nodded on our Zoom call.
In hushed tones, teachers whispered about dark screens and how it feels to do standup facing the brick wall, with earplugs in, while trying to fix the microphone. Tap. Tap. Now? Can you…?
Honestly, who is surprised? Raise your hand so we know where to throw the tomatoes.
Okay.
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I was a little surprised.
I had taken all of my grief and panic and shoved it under the seven broken pens in my junk drawer. I had a task! Teach! Go!
I, mistakenly, asked my students to do the same. We did diagnostic exams to get to know our artificially intelligent teachers. I planned lessons I thought would be culturally sustaining; we shared stories about ourselves; we read the word to read the world.
And, yet, they were still stressed.
I saw dark circles under their eyes. I met with young people who didn’t leave their darkened rooms all day, though I had a vague idea that vitamin D matters. This all came to a head when two students decided to take their lives. The tragedy is too real in an already tragic year.
Here are the facts: we get two hours a week on Zoom. I have choices to make. We can do more grammar exercises and close the junk drawer of stress or not.
What would you do? (Presumably, you’re a teacher if you’re still here — what do you do?)
Research from across the country has pointed out that mindfulness training relieves stress and promotes a host of other beneficial coping skills for young people.
According to transformingeducation.org
“Mindfulness is a state of awareness and a practice; it involves attending to the present moment and cultivating an attitude of curiosity, openness, and acceptance of one’s experience.”
It also means sitting still, breathing, and doing all of the things I feel I cannot, including being kind to the parts of myself that are still grieving for my students and our community. For my kids, I try.
I looked for a writing app (any writing app) that would slow the process down and ask students to stop and practice mindfulness throughout the writing process.
It doesn’t exist.
There are apps like Hemingway, that make writing more precise. Can we talk about the dude who inspired the app? You know, the PTSD-inflicted soldier who drank heavily and suffered for his art? We romanticize his works while rarely reflecting on the cost. Just do it! Push through! So often, even on the small scale in classrooms, we have accepted that creativity comes with the burden of pain or at least minor discomfort.
Forgive me if I refuse to add minor discomfort to the list of maladies 2020 has shat on my students.
The app to make sure they are well, calm, and productive in the context of writing seemed to be a paradox in our culture.
We decided to shift paradigms on our own.
We draw boxes in the air with our fingers while we breathe.
We trace our hands and sometimes think about hand turkeys.
Students reported that starting an essay is the most stressful part of the writing process. We ramped up with extra time to not work, to stay still and breathe.
Yes, we did the nifty brainstorm that I learned from that one workshop and all of the notes and all of the discussions.
However, before we swing for the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we shore up the bottom.
But really, the new thing this year is accepting stay as a chance to gather ourselves. We have a moment to breathe, if nothing else, before we carry on.
In the long term, ideal digital writing solutions would include a self-scan or another way to build the mindful skills we need to be healthy and productive.
No more facing trauma with extreme and painful productivity, now at the cyborg level. There are humans behind that glass you are tapping on. Be sure not to harm them or yourself as you interact.
