Socrates Weeps

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Socrates Weeps

No doubt a number of my undergraduate students assume that Socrates and I were contemporaries.  Which isn't all that strange as they also think that Socrates was the drummer who Ringo replaced in the early days of The Beatles. And it is usually only the graduate students who know that The Beatles was the band that Paul McCartney was in before Wings.  But I wax cynical, which is problematic as I often have trouble just finding cynical, let alone reserving the time for waxing it - I think it is out in the garage somewhere.

But back to the Socratic method.  For those of you who live in towers other than the ivy-covered one in which I have spent most of my life, the Socratic method defines the bucolic myth of higher education; wise teachers sit with a cohort of curious students - ideally in an olive grove - engaging in a lively and penetrating dialogue about issues both enlightening and profound. 

It sprang to mind last week when I stood in front of a classroom in which every one of the 78 seats were taken.  

"Wow," I thought. "It has been what? a decade? since I have taught a class this small!"  Socrates weeps. 

I did my undergraduate work at Kalamazoo College in the late 1960s.  It is a small liberal arts college in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  A couple hundred students north of a thousand constitutes the student body. While I recall large classes - maybe 40 students in Western Civilization and Entomology - it seems that most of my classes had fewer than 20 students.  The main campus consisted of picturesque brick classrooms, dorms and a student union surrounding a shady lawn that climbed a rolling hill, topped by the steepled chapel that smiled benevolently down on us as we scurried along to class.  I do not actually remember having had classes out under the oaks, but we may have done so. A former professor of mine from Kalamazoo College is one of us here on The Wall, if his memory of the view from the other side of the desk conflicts with my recollections, I will pass those revisions along. 

In contrast, I teach at an institution of about 35 thousand students, 2000 faculty and some 3000 administrators. So 40,000 of us call NC State home to some degree or another. It is a huge institution, and one that has grown increasingly dependent upon technology to accomplish its most central objective: teaching students.  Well, maybe its second most central objective - behind grant writing, and there is publishing . . . But let's leave that tangle for another day. Back to Socrates and teaching. 

While I considered it aberrant at the time I now find bittersweet the memory of a colleague in the English department who, decades ago - when the task simply entailed dropping a coaxial cable from the ceiling - refused to allow "that thing" into his office. Now we simply cannot do our job without "that thing."  We, either by choice or mandate, post our syllabuses on the Internet, we handle the sensitive concerns of students with disabilities on the Internet, we present our classroom notes over the Internet, we record student grades over the Internet, we distribute lectures to distant students over the Internet, we even manage our own University retirement accounts over the Internet.

And in the ten or eleven days since the semester began, when I called upon those various functions, every single one has malfunctioned. And no, I have been doing this for years. Operator error was not the issue. The cause was, in each case, the Glitch Who Stole Christmas. The "outages" have ranged from minor irritations to major disruptions in my ability to do my job. 

However, as surprising as it may seem, the primary motivation behind this post cum rant is not the fact that the Internet is so untrustworthy - I have taught about the Internet for years before there was an Internet. I have always known it is a fickle lover, promising more than it ever really can deliver. I try, often futilely, to instill that same wary attitude in my students.

No, the burr under my saddle this time is that having to take care of the Internet makes it increasingly difficult to take care of my students.  I spend hours making sure the technology necessary to interact with my students works, which compresses the time I have available to consider what I wish to share with them, horribly. We may have fooled ourselves into believing that the swift and efficient exchange of texts, or voice mails or skypeing counts as a Socratic dialogue that encourages relationships and critical thinking. That is simply not true. At the very best, these tools serve as compromises for a conversation under the elms. We have come to believe that the compromises are the equal of the human systems they have come to replace.

And that is why Socrates weeps.

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