… but I laughed so hard at the first three paragraphs of Todd Levin’s TV: How Novel, I think I dislocated my shoulder again. Here’s the first:

I don’t own a television, and I never have. That’s not some fact I wave around, like a flag of self-righteousness. And if you own a television–and most people do–I don’t think that necessarily makes you stupid or lazy, or both. In fact, I praise your exercise of free will. I mean, if that’s how you imagined your life playing out, staring unblinkingly, the TV screen illuminating the grim lines of your expression, as you are lulled into a kind of corporate-mediated complacency while your dreams slowly calcify and die somewhere between the cushions of your couch, then good for you! I totally respect your choice; it’s just not the choice I’ve made. Because I don’t own a television. And I never have.

I think I made a friend today.

Clearly I teach in the wrong country. Blogger-to-watch Jeff expands on the value of media in the classroom, which, it so happens ain’t just a teacherly indulgence in Hong Kong (as it is in my class & country) it’s a legislated standard.

Re that super slick commercial I posted the other day:

Todd: Do they need to see a video to understand it even better than they already do?

The answer is no. Definitely not. This isn’t a better way to teach personification, just different.

Todd then takes his line of inquiry to the next available stop.

Todd: what’s the pay off for having shown it?

“Different” is, in a serious way, its own payoff.

Personification may be an easy concept to teach through any number of traditional routes. But asking the question “do they need to see a video?” oftentimes means ignoring the question “do they want to see a video?” And I realize that both of our students want to cancel class and throw dice, but this isn’t that argument.

It’s just really really important for our students to see us in different dimensions than just “English teacher” and “math teacher.” It’s important for us to surprise them constantly. It’s important to me that my students don’t know what cool thing I might show off next period. It’s important to me that they see me enthusiastic about t.v. and commercials and whatever else besides math. It makes me accessible and, at the same time, very mysterious.

Even though that video is merely “different,” not better, the fact that you’re showing a t.v. commercial in class (!) in order to teach English will make your kids cock their heads and think for a second that maybe they don’t have you pinned down. The ambiguity in which I cloak myself by showing any relevant commercial or short film I come across (and a lot of irrelevant ones during the class break), again, in a very serious way, brings in kids who would otherwise take a second lunch period. That mystique, in a way that is completely pedagogically unjustified, makes me a better teacher.

T.V. is such an eager punching bag. One look at a set-top box offers up a flurry of reasons to knock it around. Denouncing t.v. is a popular pastime for many and teachers tend to mix it up more than most. Among educator circles, t.v. has come to symbolize the coast-to-coast 24-hr. live transmission of ignorance and has absorbed blame for worse than that.

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Sorry about that. It just came up the other day, this general sense that educators are in something of a bind w/r/t television and their students’ viewing habits, which are, admittedly, atrocious straight across the board.

Used to be that teachers could teach transmission-style, lecturing for more than five minutes at a stretch, assign problems one through thirty odd, and preach the immorality of t.v. without inhibition.

But lecturing has become stigmatized, problem sets must be differentiated, and a teacher singing the universal immorality of any medium is an odd tune to hear.

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