It’s already half.”parable of the sower” Written by Octavia Butler And we have arrived at an important turning point in the plot. The main character, Lauren Olamina, loses her family and home in an arson incident. I wanted my students to fully experience the gravity of this loss, so I didn’t just continue on. workshop model I decided to read out loud to the class what I have been using throughout the unit so far.
I sat there for three hours, exhausted and frightened. Nothing happened to me, but I could see and hear something happening. There were people moving around the hill, running and walking up the hill, sometimes seeing their silhouettes in the sky…I heard a lot of gunshots – individual gunshots and short bursts of automatic weapons. I heard a burst…
“Why are we reading this?” a student interrupts. The class remains quiet. I looked up and saw most of the people with their hands on their heads. They looked up at me with downcast eyes, bored. Some begin to turn their phones over, others reach into their pockets.
“Because it’s important,” I said, “this world is not that far from ours.”
Another student replied, “But it’s not that bad.”
“But what if that happens one day?” you ask. “Don’t you think that’s important to you?”
Another student shrugs. The other one is staring blankly at me.
Although Parable of the Sower was written in 1993, some argue that Butler’s predictions are bone-chillingly accurate. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean anything if all the student wants is to get back on their phone.
For many of my students, reading is not a harbinger of revolutionary action, but a tedious task that is always a prelude to another boring assessment. Even in this situation, reading displayed Be a tool for building empathy. empathy It’s how we learn to care for people we’ll never meet. In this case, the convenience of technology created a sense of instant gratification that was antithetical to the empathy cultivated by reading.
When I talk to colleagues about the indifference I notice in the classroom, I find that the large amount of text, the important words, and the complexity of Butler’s ideas are all uncomfortable for students. If you just show your students a page with a lot of words, they will quickly lose interest.
I recognize that my role is not to reflect their self-satisfaction, but rather to model what it is like to care. But how can you get them to care if you can’t even help them understand the value of a book that clearly shows the effects of our collective negligence? It is impossible to reach this empathy that reading provides without helping students gain the tools to build the mental and emotional stamina to tackle complex texts.
Boredom and building executive function
People are not yet roaming the streets en masse in search of food and water, but people are doing just that all over the world. as I write this. In our country, our democracy is also at risk. Despite all this, alpha generation I care less and less.
Students these days are more interested in quickly scrolling through their friends’ Stories, checking their friends’ likes and direct messages, and using filters on social media apps to upload their stories. It seems that In my opinion, because their impulses are wired to do so, and because they are too focused on themselves, the immediacy of the task, and the immediate gratification of a “like”, students will or an inability to sit deeply and meaningfully with the experience.
Students reach for their phones while on the move, while reading passages, in between whole-group discussions, and in moments of boredom. Picking up the phone is a first step, but it doesn’t address the problem: instant withdrawal in the face of dense, complex text. To reverse these trends, students need to adopt the habit of boredom.
Boredom, despite its negative connotations, is a discipline that frees the mind from the awareness of the need for constant activity. Research shows that doing nothing can lead to inspiration, imagination, and presence. Boredom is an emotion that students need to learn to befriend in order to work on complex texts. Because boring doesn’t mean you should miss out on the thought-provoking reading experience that Parable of the Sower offers.
Boredom should be practiced daily and explicitly in the classroom. Just set a timer and sit there with your students. Put away your cell phone and don’t leave anything on your desk. Please sit there. Do nothing. This trains the mind to reject any impulse and reach for distractions from the present moment.
In my classroom, continue reading silently (SSR) There are no comprehension assessments to build. reading stamina Helping students find their true love of reading. Like boredom, this practice requires silence and presence. During this time, students’ minds may wander, but self-regulation is necessary as they are expected to remain silent and interact with the words.
Boredom and SSR are also connected executive function Because it requires students to be present, focus, and control their impulses. If students are only allowed to sit in class and think about their thoughts or look at books, reading requires concentration, which is a necessary first step to reading thick texts. Over time, if students learn that being bored or bored is not such a bad thing, the urge to pull out the phone or back out of a difficult task will hopefully lessen. Sho.
Going Down Reading
To be honest, most days I feel helpless. Even if the phone is away, it will remain disconnected. And in some ways, this disconnect is incredibly valid. activismthere are few changes that students can stick with. If young people see the gap between social movements and the world’s continuing rifts, it makes sense to give up and focus on themselves.
Some of my solutions were to connect parts of “Parable of the Sower” to current and local events. In the Bay Area, Poverty rate is extremely high With the rising cost of living. In San Francisco, Homelessness has long been a crisis. The gap between rich and poor is enormous and we have seen this Impact of climate change Parts of the bay are experiencing extreme heat. Through my efforts, I helped my students understand the correlation between these harsh realities and the situation in Lauren’s world. But still, apathy remains.
“What do you mean? The world is going to end anyway,” they tell me.
And if it’s true that the world is ending, there will still be a period after society collapses when all we have left is each other. Next comes empathy and community. When Lauren finally succeeded in building a community, she told them:
…If we’re willing to work, there’s plenty of opportunity here. There are seeds in the pack… What we have to do at the moment is more like gardening than farming. Everything has to be done by hand, including composting, watering, weeding, and removing worms and slugs. Together, we can protect ourselves and protect our children. A community’s first responsibility is to protect its children, the children we have now and the children yet to come…
As Lauren says, the work of building community can be daunting, but we must protect our children. They will bear the brunt of a broken world. We protect them by giving them the tools they need to survive. Empathy is a tool for survival in a world shaped by individualism, but it cannot be practiced without poor impulse control. Empathy requires discipline, and discipline comes from facing discomfort and becoming friends.
In my ideal classroom, students read words and form connections to themselves and the world. They push themselves to work on dense paragraphs. They annotate. Although they may struggle, they appreciate the long process of learning and understanding. They walk away with expanded perspectives and thoughts about the world because they have just experienced a life that is not their own. However, this empathetic presence can only be achieved if the student is self-regulated enough to control the impulses that produce disengagement. If students believe that all the answers should be readily available in one tool in their hands: their phones, disengagement is inevitable.
But as long as I’m in the classroom, I know that my duty as a teacher is to model care and empathy, regardless of complaints. I am still comforted by one student who understands the value of reading novels that teach us who we become when we forget about each other. Because without each other we are nothing.
