Cynthia Selfe

The first thing that I noticed about Synthia on the handout provided to us was the fascinatingly long and varied list of interests. That alone was enough to draw my solid interest. I think if we are to remain alive intellectually as engaged scholars we must be pursuing various avenues and aspects of interest. I would hope that someday someone who asked me (I don't expect I'll ever have done enough of importance for anyone to find out about it any other way) to receive such a long and vibrant list of interests. I remember reading in a memoir entitled Know it All about the author's experience meeting Alex Trebek. Trebek told him during their discussion that a person should maintain an intellectual curiosity even about things that bored them, or something to that effect. I think that is a worthy goal. We cannot specialize in everything, it's impossible, even within our own relatively narrow field of English. But we can maintain an intellectual curiousity about any of the infinite subjects available to us to learn about.

What I learned most from Cynthia's example is something I thought I already knew: the teacher of young people, especially the secondary teacher must maintain a certain level of familiarity with the newest, latest things especially in technology if they are to remain relevant. I knew that it helped that I still listen to current popular music, that I am an avid and opinionated fan of television and movies and so have those in common with my students, but had never made the same connection to the idea of technology itself. I realized in this class for the first time, that my Thoreauian approach to technology (Simplify! Simplify! interpreted as "if it's not absolutely necessary to my life try to do without it...) is perhaps detrimental to my profession as a teacher let alone my ability to relate to my students. I maintain that I do not need to carry around a new fancy cell-phone (I've grudgingly accepted a cell phone paid for by my in-laws as a hint we should call more often) or keep up to date with a site on all the latest social sites to do this, but red in the face I must admit that I have been willfully ignorant of too much. Red in the face not because I did it, but because the root motivation is fear. There is nothing I despise more than feeling stupid. Nothing. And Technology does that to me. A lot. Still, I have also maintained that fear is a stupid reason to avoid trying something, investigating it, at least making an attempt to understand. So this portion of the presentation really opened my eyes.