My Atari Weighs a Ton: Another True Tale of the Digital Age

Have you ever considered using puppets?

...my friend asked. He was serious. I could tell he was serious because he wasn't laughing, nor was he grinning, nor was he doing much of anything besides nursing a plate of French fries and a tall, cool chocolate egg cream.

Puppets might work. Give you that edge you need in the classroom. You do have something of a glamor deficiency, you know. I wanted to break it to you gently but, since it's come up sooner than I expected, I thought I'd lay everything on the table for you and let you pick up the pieces. Could you pass the salt, please?

It was late in the summer of 1997 and I was just starting my Ph.D. work and preparing to teach a first-year literature and composition class in one of the University of Connecticut's "High-Tech Classrooms." I had been teaching for little over a year and to me "high-tech" meant a fresh pack of dustless chalk, a handy item I had just discovered at a local office supply store. Being the good, disciplined Catholic-school boy I will always be, in my imagination if not in reality, I was convinced a good teacher needed nothing more than a book, a blackboard, and maybe-if the stars are in order and everything is right with the moon and the planets-just maybe a sturdy podium. Finding a package of yellow and pink dustless chalk turned out to be the find of the century for me until the Director of Freshman English, a tall, slim man with a gleaming bald head and a thick brown mustache, informed me that I would be teaching in a room with fifteen Macintosh computers.

Do I have to turn them on? I asked him. They're optional, right?

The Director, clearly amused and perhaps a little irritated, grinned and said,

Welcome to the 21st century, soon-to-be-Doctor Cremins.

As I walked out of the Director's office, I found I'd broken out into a cold sweat. My arms were covered in goose flesh and I felt as though I'd just watched a Hammer Horror films marathon on NYC's channel 11, once famous for its spectacular Saturday-afternoon "Creature Features." As I devised ways to revise my syllabus in order to accommodate the brave new world of the High-Tech Room, I decided to make a weekend trip to New York. I needed fresh air, advice, and a 1-pound El Paso burger at Paul's Palace, located at 131 2nd Avenue, right between St. Mark's and 7th Street. I needed to formulate a plan. Teaching first-year writing classes is always a challenge...

I'm a pre-business horticulture and postmodern semiotic baseball theory major, so I don't really need your class, you know-and besides, you're just a grad student, so you don't grade that hard, do you, pal?

...but what would it be like with fifteen fresh-faced students and their blinking, humming computer terminals? My friends in New York would have an answer for me. At the very least, they would buy me lunch, which is always a coup when you're on a teaching assistant's salary.

Puppets. You need puppets. It will keep the students' attention and also keep them from playing video-games while you're lecturing about semicolons and parallel structure,

....my friend said again after he had sprinkled his Saint Mark's Burger ("A CheeseBurger Topped with Ham and Fried Onions") with a liberal dash of salt and a splash of ketchup. He remained serious. I could tell he wasn't joking because of the precision with with he attacked his burger and his plate of golden-brown spicy fries.

Puppets? You can't be serious! This is a college writing class. I am a graduate student. It's my job to get these kids ready for college-level writing and research. I can't use puppets. This isn't the Muppet show, for goodness' sake! How I am supposed to compete with a room full of computers? I feel like Paul Anka or Fabian during the British invasion. I'm on my way out, man. The machines are taking over! They wanna hold my hand and there's nothing I can do about it but sing about breaking up and that's hard to do and all that. I'm Pat Boone and they're the Rolling Stones! And now you're telling me I should use puppets to keep the students interested in me instead of in the computers?

My friend smiled as he cleaned his plate and washed his meal down with the fizzling remains of his egg cream.

I'm just making a suggestion. I think you have some issues you need to work out and I'm just saying that if you can't do it, there's always the Children's Television Workshop. You get an old Fozzy Bear or a Kermit or-God help us-a Grover or a Miss Piggy, and you'll have those kids flashing back to their preschool days. Works for me.

I should have explained earlier that my friend is a filmmaker and playwright. Having grown increasingly frustrated with actors over the years, he now employs only inanimate objects and members of his immediate family in all of his theater and film projects.

Though I resisted him at first, I slowly began to agree with my friend. I did have issues. I was absolutely terrified of having to compete with a group of computers. Although my Director had explained the purpose of the High-Tech Room to me, I failed to understand how I might develop a fruitful relationship with the machines while also trying to assist and instruct my students.

The computers are there to help facilitate good writing, Brian,

...he had explained slowly with a deliberateness normally reserved for animals and small children.

The computers are networked, meaning that students can send each other rough drafts and give each other feedback. We're using the classroom in order to stress the importance of process over product in academic writing. It's an old-fashioned idea reinforced with space-age tools. You should be excited. Think of yourself as a technological pioneer, my boy!

The more detailed my Director's explanation had become, the more discouraged I felt and, as I walked with my theatrical friend to a show at the legendary Bowery club CBGB's, I grew even more disenchanted. The space-age? Was he serious? Was the Director living in a science fiction story from the 1930s? Did he expect me to dress like Flash Gordon and live with him in some world-of-tomorrow which existed only in his imagination? I was still mourning the loss of my electric typewriter, and he wanted me to lead a shiny new army of machines. As I sat in a dim booth at the back of CBGB's, a club not known for it's space-age decor, I began to trace the roots of my confusion.

Who's playing here tonight? I asked my friend.

Atari Teenage Riot or the Donkey Kongs or something like that, he answered

...and, for a moment, the club was filled with a white, almost blinding light. Quite suddenly and unexpectedly, my friend had revealed the source of my secret fears and anxieties, and there wasn't a puppet in sight, just a few purple-haired punk kids wearing Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars.

I have the answer!

I yelled as I jumped from the booth to escape into the cool evening air.

It's the blasted Atari! The Atari, I tell you! The bloody ATARI!

My friend followed me to the street and began muttering to fellow club-goers,

Hey, hey, nothing to see here, just pass on by, he'll be all right, just a little overexcited to be here in the heart of the world. Nothing to see here, people! Just relax. Uh, Cremins, what's up? I mean, I know they're not your favorite band, but that's no reason to pitch a fit.

As I stumbled back to my friend's apartment (Maybe you shouldn't have gotten a double helping of spicy fries, he said), I tried to explain myself, to exorcise the technology-spawned demons which had haunted me since childhood. What follows is a mercifully condensed version of the tale I told my friend. Think of it as a kind of parable, an ancient fairy-tale for the digital present:

When I was a young boy, I discovered the world of computer games. In the early 1980s, words like "joystick" and "Pac-Man" held sway over the imaginations of my classmates. The other boys and girls often spoke in hushed, reverent tones of mythic creatures like Donkey Kong, Q-Bert, Frogger and Spy Hunter. During lunch the other boys at my table would speak of destroying asteroids or saving the world from Space Invaders. Speaking in animated tones as they hunted in their colorful lunchboxes for drink boxes and Kraft cheese spread, they resembled old men who had been hardy explorers in their youth and now gathered at mealtime to reenact and relive their escapades through the art of storytelling. I, however, did not yet have an Atari of my own. I sat outside this circle of mystery and adventure. Besides, I reassured myself, who needs a machine to play games? I can make those up on my own, or read my comic books, or see the Flash Gordon movie for the fiftieth time. What need did I have for the strange, buzzing, beeping, neon world of a home arcade system?

Once we reached my friend's apartment, and he had finished listening to these stories, he sighed and patted me on the shoulder.

I'll ask my wife to start working on that puppet for you when she gets back from vacation, he said.

I have always had a love-hate relationship with computers, and I place most of the blame on the Ataris, Commodore 64s, and Colecovisions of my childhood. When it came time for me to use computers in my own classroom, I grew nervous and distracted because, despite all the help they'd been to me over the years as word-processors and e-mail delivery systems, I still viewed personal computers as nothing more than video-game systems designed only to entertain and not to instruct. A computer in a classroom? Can't you get a detention for that? Shouldn't the computer wait until after you've finished your homework?

To everything there is a season, as they say, and a time to every purpose under heaven. I taught my classes in the High-Tech Room and found myself developing a strong, if not affectionate, working relationship with the legion of Power Macs who shared the classroom with me. I did not resort to the use of action figures at any time during the year I worked in this experimental environment, which would look primitive by today's standards even though I taught this first "computer-aided" class only five years ago. Most of my students in that first High-Tech class later informed me that they'd not only learned a good deal about "college writing," but had also had "fun." I felt a sense of relief, even victory. This semester, in fact, I will be teaching an online, interactive course on American short stories, so I guess you could say I have overcome my fear of the space-age and embraced the technology of the new century.

While some things, thankfully, do not change-CBGB's is the greatest punk club in the country, Paul's Palace makes the juiciest burgers on the East Coast, Gem Spa serves the silkiest chocolate egg creams in the known universe, and NYC is the most beautiful city in the world-others do. Everything flows, nothing remains, as Heraclitus reminds us. My laptop, which I will be using for my online course this semester, is now home to a number of ancient video games, including "Donkey Kong" and "Space Invaders," both of which can now be downloaded from the Internet for the gaming pleasure of those of us who missed their primitive, eye-straining charm during the early 1980s.

And, for the record, I once used a Superman action figure to illustrate a point in one of my literature classes, but that is a story best left for the next millennium.