'Powerpoint was not his thing': a poem on teaching and technology
- Written by The Conversation Contributor
The Parana River in moonlight. Gisela Giardino, CC BY-SAI am a scholar and teacher of Spanish and Portuguese. I am also a poet.
The several books of poetry I have published in English, Spanish and Guarani (an indigenous South American language and one of the official languages of Paraguay), plus numerous readings of my work, both in Paraguay and at home in New York, have taught me the artistic joys of the poetic word and its efficacy in public discourse.
The poem, obviously, is a work of imagination, but it is my contention that such a work can be an alternative way of understanding and therefore an alternative form of editorial journalism.
The most fundamental source of the educational vision portrayed in the poem I have written for The Conversation is the many thousands of hours I have spent with students over a long teaching career.
Having said that, I hasten to add that no resemblance is intended, even remotely, between the narrative situation presented and any of the educational institutions with which I have been associated, including my long-time much-beloved employer, SUNY-Oswego.
The forces to which the poem alludes are much broader.
The rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and the inroads technology can make in the basic human relationship between teacher and learner – these and similar developments are at work in our society as a whole, and the debate surrounding them is global in scope.
Using the elevated tone and deliberately archaic language of epic verse, the poem’s intent is to write those forces larger in the imagination than they are in present reality, to exaggerate their current profile in order to dramatize what they could become.
As to its style and tone, the poem’s roots are in various epic traditions but readers will also find echoes of the tech writer Nicholas Carr; of movies like Dead Poets’ Society and Good Will Hunting; of Paraguayan literary masters like Augusto Roa Bastos and Juan Manuel Marcos (novel and poetry) and, in its playful parts, even a hint of Dr Seuss. (A full list of my literary “credits” follows the poem.)
(Note on pronunciation: In observance of the poem’s rhythm, the protagonist’s middle names “Ignatius Gene” may be pronounced as normal in English, ig-NAY-shus jeen, but the Paraguayan name from which this derives, Ignacio Genes, should be said as in Spanish, eeg-NAHS-yo HAY-nays.)
Channeling Homer, Among Others…
I
Not the song of siren-seekers
washed in gore upon a reef,
or Hector on the Trojan plain,
or Cid who risking body
in the horse-loud crowd
of battle-drum and scimitar
made victory out of blood,
no epic song is this
of these, but rather epic
of the mind, no less dangerous
than all their battlefields,
but fought upon the blood-
drenched plains and trenches
of book and classroom,
where courage of the intellect
meets scimitar of budget
cut and mindless fiat
of endless plutocrats intoning
measurement of that which
has no measure.
II
His name,
Juan Emmanuel Ignatius Gene
O'Higgins, PhD in code of résumé
and memo, expert in forgotten holocausts
and vast interstices unseen
between the lines upon the map,
Paraguay, in other words,
Paraguay his theme, his passion,
mission, demise, redemption.
Son he was of Irish guy
from Southie and mom from
shantytown hard by the Paraná
who met and loved in the father’s
Fulbright-funded bed beneath
the fullness of a fattening
moon. Jasy henyhe she said
in Guarani and coitus wrote
the words in English on his
brain, the moon is full,
and Juan Emmanuel began in semen
spilled upon her river, hard
upon the Paraná. Thus was made
and grew the boy, precursor
of the man, in summers
by the Paraná and winters
in the gritty Boston snow
piled against the chain-link
playground fence, his fists
hard as curbstones fending tires
from the ragged Southie sidewalks
and the green-beer-sucking
drunks in foreplay of St Patty’s Day,
grew he here, and there,
and came to know man’s state
is not the metropole, the evanescing
center swelled in fad soon gone
and power soon dispersed,
but one of Paraguays, of Southies,
of margins where persists
the warmth of human flesh,
fencerows where persist the weeds
of truths the tractor long
despised, each of us a Paraguay,
a body among bodies, a voice
not of device disembodied
but of palpitations of the living
throat, came he to know
this, swore he to make it
known and chose the teacher’s
way.
III
Jasy henyhe she’d said,
and his moon waxed full
in love of students, each
a Paraguay hard by the Paraná
descending to whatever
sea, each a voice he sang
in chorus with, farm kids
avid for the world beyond
manure pond and feedlot,
grocer’s children wanting
other than a daily ledger
of hams and lettuces, would-be
gangbangers saved by book and dream
of something more from stink
of prison john and sameness
of the pavements. Told he them
in class about his namesake
of the Paraguayan War Ignacio
Genes, hero who in combat
lost an eye and used his other
one to shield his brothers,
his single Cyclops eye a waxing
moon for them and us; told
he also them of Barrett, Roa Bastos,
Emiliano, Chaco thirst, Cerro Korá,
Ramona Martínez, residentas,
Ortiz Guerrero, de la Mora, Jesuit
and Guarani, and thousand million
un-named feet of un-named walkers
stumbling in dark of exile, greed, depravity
and grief to greet again the dawn
upon a shoeless blister. You,
he said, are these if you
but knew. Rise he said
to stoop to drink the water
that I lead you to. The
stinking mud is yours no matter
what, be hero in it, let your
single eye be waxing moon for northern
farm and pavement, grocer’s shelf
and banker’s vault. That distant
Paraguay be metaphor for here,
for now, for you.
IV
Powerpoint
was not his thing, nor leaned he
overly on Wiki-factoids gleaned
from Google’s vast and churning
cloud upon a screen for user-
friendly access antiquating
memory; no enemy was he of such,
but rather foe of opiated overuse
in detriment of man. Thus read he
them from books and spun
his magic out of alchemy
of word and print and mind, and bid
he them put on persona of the Other
and leave their desks and move
as actors in the theater of learning,
and laughter and movement
were their language. And made
he them traverse the dog-piss
snow of January in the parking
lots to fetch the printed word
of libraries, bodily traverse
the campus air that they might
know that body and mind are
lovers, nor holds the mind
to anything not sifted through
the efforts of the flesh; it was
his body’s eye that Genes gave
to spur the waxing moon of freedom
in the mind of many. Nor resented
they his call to book and library,
but loved him for it more, nor called they
more for apps and Wiki-screens
and disembodied ease, but reveled
rather in respect he gave
to wholeness of their thinking
body-minded selves, they who
sported on the green and flaunted
skin in spring to drink
the frisbee-joyous air en route
to class, loved they him for this,
and loved he them.
V
But came one day
a lie that slunk in frowsy crannies
of curricula and syllabi, and hung
upon the winter-weary campus breeze,
and bided time in e-mails
and the minutes of perfunctory
ennui-laden polyester meetings, a multi-
visaged lie with roots enough
in truth of need to sway
the well-intentioned gullible
and stroke the greed of cynics,
a glib shape-shifting hydra-
headed lie part fiat of the bottom
line, part flim-flam sales
pitch of purveyors, demagogic
populism, or wish indeed sincere
for good, yet nonetheless,
a lie. It said, efficiency
is all. It said, make straight
the way to drone-dom
in diminishment of cost. It
said the ancient bargain
trading effort of the body-mind
for betterment of life, our
ancient soaring chant of sacrifice
and sweat, is moot,
is mothballed in the new
millennium of ever-easier machines
un-making man. No need,
it said, to stir from seat or bed
in quest of knowing, nor even
need to know, it is known
for you. No need to drive
a car, it is driven, nor need
to flush the toilet, it is flushed,
nor need to walk the woods,
nor need to read a map,
nor need to pit the body-mind
against the wanton wind in lofty
affirmation of the self. No need,
it said, for Paraguay as metaphor
for man. No need for man, indeed.
Irrelevant, it said, and set the moon
to waning on the Paraná.
VI
Came
minions of the lie, came memos,
e-mails, texts, reports ad hoc,
inquiring why the love of books
when all is stocked within
the cyber-cloud, inquiring
why the gathering of bodies
in a class when synchronicity
of keyboards and facsimile
of voice and face upon a screen
will do the job, and the moon
waned more while waxed a logic
that portrayed itself inevitable. Ad
hoc became ad hominem, came
minions to his class in guise
of friendly observation. And taught he
as he always taught, and the class
they saw was light, was art,
was theater, was Socrates,
was dream of every learner
keening for the graceful
stretch of mind and body
into space unknown, was reason
why we gather sons and daughters
into schools and spur them
into plenitude of man and not
to lassitude of larva, metal,
stone. No drone, said he, was Genes
in the groaning eyeball-costing
fight, but man, as man aspires
to become. Rose the students
to ovate, embraced they him,
loved they him as loved he
them. Rose the minions too
in momentary lapse infused
by distant memory of dream
to teach, reached out also
to embrace…, then dropped
their arms in tendering
instead a squalid shake
of hands, their logic of the lie
resurgent from its wistful
lapse. Your future is assured,
they said, tenure and respect
are yours they said, if you but…
and placed they in contingent
clauses all a word of strings
attached: if you but… forsake
the luddite past of book
and pen, your sentimental
fondness for the family
of class, your notion of the learner
as a greater whole than all
the petty bell-curve of his
résumé and GPA and bank
accounts. Access, cost, utility,
and ease, be these your shibboleths
in this new singularity where man’s
machines suck share of his humanity
and his blood is but the driver
of the bloodless goosestep
of electrons, and Paraguay
and all the Paraguays and all
the Southies and all your
farmer’s sons and grocer’s
daughters are merely asterisks
within the Internet now
upper-cased as if a God. They
spoke the lie, and waited
for his yes, and all he said
was no.
VII
And with that no
the eye he lost in battle was
his job, his mortgage, colleagues,
place within the circle of his
students’ arms. Yet also was
that no a moon sudden waxing
like a fist upon the face
of facelessness, his fist
as once he used it in the Southie
schoolyard slush upon the quisling
jaws of thugs.
VIII
Read I of him
one red-eye sweltering night
upon my Fulbright-funded bed
beneath a moon so white
upon the Paraná it spoke
to me of snow, and cooled
me as I read. And saw I then
the moon is more than mere
reflector of another’s light
as science holds, but marks
of its own right, the tides
of human blood and tribulations
of the human soul. A blurb
is all I read, filler in the local
rag, page forty-three between
an ad for condoms and someone’s
invocation of the Virgin, a line or two
about a Paraguayan-Yankee
hybrid guy who erstwhile
taught in university up north
and now was eighth-grade teacher
here in Paraguay. Odd, said I,
and made the obligatory Google
search, and found the case
of Juan Emmanuel Ignatius
Gene O’Higgins, Ph.D., stripped
of job for saying no. And
the moon that made me
think of snow upon the Paraná
also gave my mind to know
that North and South are two
but Man is one, and Juan
Emmanuel is Man. And went I
when the sun arose, to find,
perchance to interview, the man.
And as I rode my bike
upon the red dirt road beside
the crones preparing tereré
and lorries painting smoke
across an asthma-colored sky,
my eyes embraced the toddlers
squalid in the clawing dust,
the children manning carts
en route to chicken-peck the dumps
for scraps of bread or metal,
the prematurely nubile
waiting for a pimp or john,
and wondered I what was
the measure of our teaching
if not for these, and what
the way of schooling man
if not as man engaging man
within that self-same dust,
as Genes risking eye
against the poison mist
of war. No shortcut of machine
or screen exists for school,
nor found I shortcut
on the red dirt road to reach
the schoolyard where he was,
but came I by my bike
upon the gnarled clay and saw
his class at recess play
and him among them, and watched
them at a distance, and saw
his easy hand upon their backs
was challenge to their better selves,
his easy Guarani upon their ears
was balm upon their body-mind
to be their best in spite of dust,
to walk as Man upon the wizened
crust of earth, and knew
that he was right. And turned
I from their schoolyard
play, and upward looked, and saw
upon the blazoned sky, though
it was day, the waxing moon
of Paraguay.
This poem draws inspiration from a number of sources including Paraguayan literary masters like Augusto Roa Bastos (fiction and poetry), Juan Manuel Marcos (novel and poetry), Renée Ferrer (poetry) and Susy Delgado(poetry); the Chilean poetic genius Pablo Neruda; the Argentine poet and journalist José Hernández; former professors of mine like John Rassias and Robert Russell; my emeritus Oswego colleague Ivan Brady; and, in the playful tone of parts of the poem, even a hint of Dr Seuss.
Tracy K Lewis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
Authors: The Conversation Contributor
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