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My
Atari Weighs a Ton: Another True Tale of the Digital
Age
Brian
Cremins
University of Connecticut
Posted
February 15
2002 Student
Affairs Online, 3 (Winter)
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.
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