Forty-two chapters into Moby Dick, Herman Melville presents “The Whiteness of the Whale”:
Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.
In the ensuing pages, with sentences that ride the frontiers of grammar like this, Melville describes the color’s royal preeminence, its symbolisms of power, how it commingles with the divine, its elusive qualities, and the terrifying menagerie of white animals that wear it. From here, the author mines his giant craft on this giant sea and offers nearly 100 more chapters that probe the unseen textures of marine navigation, the perils of whaling, and the immensity of the sea.
It is beautiful language, utterly provocative, and highly challenging. To read this text properly, it seems, you’d need a studded leather chair, a cognac, perhaps a pipe, and a good deal of time. Frequently, it’s trundled out as the greatest of American novels, and so it finds its way into backpacks that also contain iPads, bronzer, extra socks, iPhones, and Spanish conjugations. But what good is it, really? After all, we have conquered all its demons; our students no longer embark in shallow whaling boats, wielding harpoons in the hopes of fueling their lanterns with blubber extract. If they want to turn on their lights, they can just tap their phones, and if they want to steer clear of Melville’s prosaic sea, they can Schmoop it on that same phone. If you want it to be, everything — especially language — can become more efficient.
And time matters when you have 425 friends, the average number among the 94 percent of U.S. teens who have Facebook accounts.1 Moby Dick, in fact, is rather typical of a Facebook member — lots of friends, but few confidantes. It’s a Harvard pedigree with good facial structure — but its user interface is so mid-19th century! Can we really ambush student life with straight-up Melville and think it will work? Or should we attempt to bridge the gap with assignments that offer inroads that are more familiar, if less comprehensive? Consider a filmmaking project to capture the barbarity of whaling, an Ishmael-infused advice blog, a chat group that categorizes “symbols” and “vocab.” Or a video montage that blends nautical images with inspiring quotes from the book, synched to whale song? Which offers the path of least resistance? Which offers the path of least evasion? Which teaches best?
It is easy enough to recreate the way I first read this text, in 1988 — 30 pages a night, discussion, a few little essays along the way, then a big essay. This approach, with its quiet pages and patient protraction, remains largely unquestioned today, but is also not as widely used. And although I have my own fond memories of discovering this story in that classroom, it would be wrong not to entertain how the intervening onslaught of cultural changes mitigates a student’s approach toward a text. The stats are familiar, but worth reiterating: According to a 2010 study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 8- to 18-year-olds devote just under eight hours (7:38) a day to entertainment media, though considering they often use more than one device at a time, they are stuffing nearly 11 hours of content into their days.2
Our students are digital natives, fully immersed. This year’s seniors were only six or seven when Facebook emerged in 2004. The wider demographic known as teachers has entered the 21st century with spottier connections. When something “new” comes along — the Harkness method, kinesthetic learning — the curious teacher will want to examine it. But the all-consuming hybrid of “technology in the classroom,” which offers unknown frontiers of everyone’s time… this is different. It has 50 million websites, 1.8 million books in print, and 75 million blogs.3 Its sheer enormity has teachers responding to it in ways they wouldn’t like their own students to take — naïve, dismissive, resigned, stubborn, polarized. In The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr warns that the Internet “is so much our servant that it would seem churlish to notice that it is also our master.”4
Let us reflect.
Paying Attention
To understand the efficacy of technology in the English classroom, it’s worth looking into the nature of attention. The word itself is rooted in the Latin words ad and tendere, which combine to mean to “stretch toward.”5 The greater the capacity to stretch, the greater the “attention span.” Deep attention involves a withdrawal of something in order to contend with something else — to make greater sense of our world, the mind must sense and respond to one of many simultaneous possibilities. As Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, sees it, “Attention is the process of taking in, sorting and shaping, planning, and decision making — a mental and emotional forming and kneading of the bread of life, or, if you prefer, an inner mountain climb.”6 It is a constant shuffling and prioritizing that Jackson likens to the work of a “conductor” of the notes of our lives, a mental discipline that is the foundation of wisdom, intimacy, and cultural progress. But with so many more notes coming in lately, especially for the students we teach, this challenge of conducting is growing.
The gathering cloud of always-accessible infobits has brought on a general phenomenon known as Continuous Partial Attention (CPA). Unlike multitasking, whose aim is to clear the way to allow for greater efficiency and productivity, CPA is the concession that attention will always be divided in the aim of not missing anything. It is the reason 20 percent of smartphone owners use their phones to check in on what other people are saying about a program while they are watching that program.7
Integrating EdTech and English Class
Because teens learn by improving upon what they already know, the bounty of tech-assisted assignments is potentially transformative. As Jesse Gainer and Diane Lapp, authors of “Remixing Old and New Literacies = Motivated Students,” see it, “The use of technology outside the classroom is not an issue to contend with, but one to embrace and bring into the classroom.”8 To complement a class reading, for instance, they advocate an assignment using Comic Life, an app that makes photos look like comics and invites users to string the narrative between the images. Gainer and Lapp’s example involves a fictional dialogue between a student and either Langston Hughes or Zora Neale Hurston, whose works had just been read. This activity engages readers, they say, because it invites them to collaborate — to both read the text and blend in their own experience and knowledge. They call this a “remix” approach and highlight several media platforms that spin it.
A perusal of academic journals and websites (all available online!) offers further ideas of EdTech, English class-style:
- Video Montages: Through slides and film clips that represents images from a class text, students use their own language to create a back-and-forth text message dialogue between characters. This has been especially recommended for demystifying Shakespeare.
- Creating Wikis: Instead of simply submitting work to the teacher, getting it back when its relevance is waning, then letting it vanish, Wikis support collaboration and let work be seen. The fact that it is peer-reviewed adds incentive.
- Animoto: This program turns photos, video clips, and music into video slideshows. An eighth-grade class, for instance, used it to create 30-second promotional trailers about Edgar Allen Poe stories.
- Digital Storytelling: Students first write a personal narrative. Then they create a three- to five-minute movie whose images reflect this piece while it is read.
- Class Blog: Using group sharing software, students can collectively submit and comment upon fellow students’ writing. If the blog is graded based solely on completion, students can feel free to discuss anxieties, social interactions, current events, and try their hand at creative writing.
- Filmmaking: Students are asked to choose a book, then make a three- to five-minute film “focused on a complex character’s growth and development, strong textual evidence, and the main theme or central idea.”9 Using handheld cameras, green screens, and video editing software, students create scripts, storyboards, camera angles, and music soundtracks to harness their own products.
The (unnamed) secondary school teacher who oversaw this last project was sanguine: “I think using the technology is almost a distraction from learning…. If you were just to tell them that that is what we want them to do, I think that would be a turnoff for them. You almost have to trick them into doing it, and I think technology allows us to do that because they have fun doing that.”10
Yes, the open-ended aspects of this assignment are generous, and who could protest the sweet sights of innovation? Considering the world’s bottomless hunger for short, sleek presentations (even the instructional video for the board game Bananagrams employed a film crew and has 15,000 views on YouTube), this exercise has great utility.
But the learning feels like trickery because it is. It has students asking, “What is the best angle to shoot this?” “Can I get away with one track or do I need two?” Or, “Why hasn’t the actor returned my text?” They are not asking, “What examples in the text support my thesis?” “Is my third paragraph relevant?” Or, “Do my ideas make sense when I read them aloud?” There is general shying away from the text here, a protective pivot using the flank of technology. If students like this assignment, they will be keener to make other movies than to read other books. This works well for filmmaking class, but not as well for English class.
Perhaps there will be an app that encourages the substantial questions needed for deep analysis and writing. But why invent this when this technology already exists in books and Microsoft Word? An 11th-grader could take a month to unpack one chapter of Toni Morrison’s Beloved; we don’t need a new form of whale oil to light the way. In the “remix” realm, the dialogue is too clicky and pasty — the sustained attention that Jackson calls the “building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress” is oversaturated by the infection of CPA.11 She warns, “Twilight cultures begin to show a preference for veneer and form, not depth and content; a stubborn blindness to the consequences of actions…. In other words, an epidemic erosion of attention is a sure sign of an impending dark age.”12
Carry-Over Effect
In his 1964 work Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan wrote, “A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.”13
McLuhan was not directly speaking of the overlay of Internet and English class, but the indication is there. The physical page begat the ereader begat the hyperlink begat the keyword begat the pop-up ad begat the SparkNote video. There’s “a crucial link,” says Anne Mangen, a Norwegian literary studies professor, between “the sensory motor experience of the materiality” of a written work and the “cognitive processing of the text content.”14 Not all text-based assignments are created equal, but the more of them we lose, the more we rupture our attachment to the text and the more we risk surrendering our deep attention skills. “We don’t see the forest when we search the Web. We don’t even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves,” writes Carr.15
In his mock-serious New York Times essay called “Faking Cultural Literacy,” Karl Taro Greenfeld quips, “It’s never been so easy to pretend to know so much without actually knowing anything.”16 He cites a recent survey from the American Press Institute revealing that nearly 6 in 10 Americans admit to reading nothing more than the news headlines. Such a skimming mentality comes at the expense of processing complex thoughts, problem solving (plotting a route on a map, say), analyzing arguments, and articulating complex thoughts.
But processing complex thoughts takes such hard work! Norbert Elliot, an English professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology, is wary of pushing his students all the way into the belly of the whale. When he challenges his students’ ideas with comments for revisions, he runs the risk of high withdrawal rates and negative teacher evaluations. He has been called a “stalker” on one website for this insistence on detail, and he rides that familiar line between inspiring his charges and turning them off. “There’s real resistance when we ask students to do these things. They go away, because they can go someplace where someone is not asking that of them,” he says.17 But does the academic landscape have to succumb to such avoidance mechanisms and shape itself in the option-oriented template of the Internet?
The Endurance of English Class
Against all this, we have English class, a place to make meaning amid the mounting and random streams of information. To the students who sleep (or lose sleep) with their phones on vibrate under their pillows, to the kids who look forward to living tech-free at summer camp, it comes with some relief that there can be such a place of reflection and focus. Reading a new book together brings uncertainty and apprehension; it forces one to make assumptions about characters, to question them, and see them evolve. “One must be an inventor to read well,” says the critic Harold Bloom.18 Texts read carefully yield discussions that begin with fictional characters, tap into their vicarious emotions, integrate personal knowledge, and spark new insights that are protracted into meaningful articulation. They invite sympathetic connections and enrich people’s experience of the physical world. As Jackson puts it, “To read a book is a grounding and an ascension all at one moment, a feat no computer can yet carry off.”19
The surface-feeding yen of PowerPoints and faux text-messaging between Romeo and Juliet can fit on a cereal box, but is not part of a balanced diet. And it contributes something to that generally insidious gulf between how much students have to say as they move about their social lives and how little comes out on the written page. Adding software to our English class arsenal offers wonderful possibilities, but not if the tool’s chief utility is convenience. If the page and screen are to wed — and the courtship seems to indicate this — the union must be conscious and edifying.
Notes
1. “Pew: 94% Of Teenagers Use Facebook, Have 425 Facebook Friends, But Twitter & Instagram Adoption Way Up.” Marketing Land. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 July 2014.
2. Friedman, Thomas L., and Michael Mandelbaum. That Used to Be Us: How America Fell behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Print. P. 128.
3. Jackson, Maggie. Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2008. Print. P. 13.
4. Carr, Nicholas G. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. Print. P. 4.
5. Jackson, p. 24.
6. Jackson, pp. 24-5.
7. “The Rise of the “Connected Viewer”.” Pew Research Centers Internet American Life Project RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Aug. 2014.
8. Jesse Gainer and Diane Lapp. ““Remixing Old and New Literacies = Motivated Students,”.” English Journal: Web.
9. Boche, Benjamin, and Melanie Shoffner. “Making Meaning through the Viewfinder: Responding to Literature through Video.” - EdITLib Digital Library. Perdue University, 2013. Web.
10. Boche and Shoffner.
11. Jackson, p. 13.
12. Jackson, p. 26.
13. McLuhan, Marshall, and W. Terrence Gordon. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko, 2003. Print. P. 237.
14. Mangen, Anne. “Hypertext Fiction Reading: Haptics and Immersion.” Journal of Research in Reading 31.4 (2008): 404-19. Web.
15. Carr, p. 91.
16. Greenfeld, Karl Taro. “Faking Cultural Literacy.” The New York Times 24 May 2014. Print
17. Jackson, p. 180.
18. Bloom, Harold. How to Read and Why. New York: Scribner, 2000. Print. P. 25.
19. Jackson, p. 182.