I’m big on origin stories. It’s why I love Game of Thrones, Star Wars, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s also why I have a hard time finishing my fiction: I get enamored in where everything came from and forget to make it to go somewhere.
Take this blog post, for instance.
It started with marijuana (as if you didn’t know). Marijuana puts me in the mood to write. It adds intensity to my every thought. I don’t smoke marijuana to get high, per se. I smoke to inspire myself. After smoking marijuana, I wait. I wait for a flash of energy whose pattern I recognize well, a combination of physical ecstasy, intellectual attraction, and forward compulsion.
The pattern might arrive from anywhere. Tonight, it came from an email I received from a colleague. I didn’t open it (my wife and I were watching an episode of Ozark at the time), but the subject line caught my attention: “We need to talk about Social Practice.”
If you don’t know me in real life, I’m a teacher, so seeing this subject line coming from one of my colleagues caused me to interpret the sentence in terms of education, as in, “We need to talk about the way we teach Social Practice.”
But here’s the thing: I’m not confident I know what “Social Practice” is.
When I don’t know the answer to something, I try to come up with one. That (more than anything) is what makes me a creative writer (it’s also what makes me fall for my own bullshit, but that’s another story).
Luckily, I’m married to a teacher, so after the episode of Ozark was over and we started to straighten up, I asked her, “Do you teach Social Practice?”
She was in the kitchen, returning her bag of popcorn to the pantry and putting her empty can of soda on the counter to be recycled later. She called back to me, “What do you mean by that?”
I rolled off the couch and retrieved my blanket from the rug. “I’m not sure.”
She came into the living room, and I started to tell her I thought it might mean…like…working with children to practice their social skills. Like, giving them scenarios that might be familiar to them and then coaching them through performing appropriate (yet still individually meaningful) actions.
I had in mind scenarios such as telling a friend you’re sorry, or greeting a stranger at a bus stop, or asking a teacher for help with an assignment, or talking to a police officer without fear or malice, or asking a new friend if they want to spend time with you, or calling a pizza shop to place an order, or asking a coworker for help with a task, or…or…or….
I don’t work in the public school system, and I haven’t attended one since I graduated high school, but I have to imagine that every school has at least one teacher who actively prepares their students for significant interactions such as job interviews, and I hope all schools at this point actively work on helping students advocate for themselves as children, but I’m not sure how many schools have teachers who actively work on helping today’s students, virtually all of whom seem to have their faces glued to their screens and virtually all of whom have their most significant relationships occurring online, learn how to perform even the most basic social interactions.
At bottom, isn’t that what schools should be for? Giving students the freedom to ask questions, practice solutions, and refine techniques? If that is what schools are for, why would we exclude their questions about the most everyday aspects of their lives?
So many adults want to blame smart phones for what they’re doing to our children’s well-being (and they’re doing quite a lot). But how many adults are willing to admit that this is the world we’ve chosen for our children, and now we must prepare them to survive and adapt?
Smart phones rob children of a vital period in their development. Between the ages of 0 and 25, the brain lays down, in less and less foundational stages, the human adult it will become. If the foundation does not include the social skills that have made us so successful as a species, the entire edifice of our humanity could crumble, having who knows what result on the future of our species.
To save the future of our humanity, we could make a dictatorial decree that bans children from ever using smart phones. After all, we ban them from using other developmentally harmful products, such marijuana, cigarettes, and alcohol. But our enforcement would probably be as lax as it is for the bans we have on their activities now (excluding our ban on their right to vote, which we still strictly enforce).
We could ban the production of smart phones themselves, but good luck convincing capitalists to give up production on an ubiquitously desired product.
If we can’t ban their production and we won’t enforce a ban on their use, then our best bet is to admit defeat and adjust to reality. And the reality is that the still-malleable future of the species is deficient in social skills. That means we need to provide children with a state-sanctioned supplement: the time and space to practice their social skills under the guidance of a well-intentioned coach.
As always, some students will be more gifted than others, and some will need specially-educated attention, but all students will benefit from becoming more conscious of the way they interact with people and adjusting their performance to better match their intentions.
I told my wife all of that using just a few hands gestures and a few mumbled phrases, but after sixteen years of living together, my wife understood what I was talking about, and she asked me to follow her upstairs so I could fold my laundry and switch the towels from the washer to the dryer.
I did as I was asked, but as I ascended the stairs, my marijuana-infused brain had moved on to wanting to tell her about a lesson I taught earlier in the day on the art of writing dialogue. By this point, she’d changed into her pajamas and moved into the bathroom, and through foamy lips, told me to stop talking while she brushed her teeth.
I retrieved my now-dried clothes from laundry room and dropped them on our bed. I folded my shirts and pants while I waited for her to finish.
I heard her rinse and spit out the water, and then put her toothbrush back in the jar. She didn’t ask me to continue with my story.
I folded my laundry in silence, letting her have her space.
She did some more stuff in the bathroom, went to my sleeping daughter’s room to tuck her in and kiss her on the forehead, then she returned to our bedroom.
“Okay,” she said, and I tore into it.
But the whole time I was telling her about the lesson, I was also thinking about this blog post, wondering if I was going to write about my colleague’s email (which I still haven’t read) or about the lesson I was telling her about, the one where I received a super positive response from my students. I could actually see the wheels moving in their heads during class, and afterwards, they were genuinely excited (though properly anxious) about their next assignment.
I used a lot of hand gestures as I told her the story, and she listened with what I took to be curious attention. When I’d finished, and we’d discussed it some more, I kissed her goodnight and raced downstairs to sit at our computer.
It’s been an hour and fourteen minutes since I sat down, and I still don’t know which topic I want to write about.
(By the way, I know how long I’ve been sitting here because I listened to the soundtrack from Season 7 of Game of Thrones as I typed all this up, and it just now came to its end.)
And that, in all truth, is this sentence’s origin story.
Before I write anything more, I ought to go read that email.
