I guess my readers have already figured out that I grew up in 1960s, the era of a diary being a small, leather-bound journal with a lock on the front. Most of them were five-year diaries, with each day being divided into five, so you had approximately four lines on which to summarize the day's events or news. My entries were hardly earthshattering; "Bus to school was boring. Art class was fun. Went to choir rehearsal after school. Mom made spaghetti for dinner." That kind of thing. Perhaps once in a blue moon, I might have made an oblique reference to a "cute guy" or a Top 40 song I liked, or the fact that it was my birthday. But as far as revelations go, that was it. Yet this diary was held in the closest secrecy, locked each and every day, and put into one drawer of my desk while the miniscule key was hidden at the bottom of the little pencil cup that also held miscellany like paper clips, thumb tacks and rubber bands. This diary was me, and the notion that anyone might read it, much less comment on its contents, would have been horrifying. My thoughts, as mundane as they were, were private. My life was private.
In the early 2000's, I regularly taught a unit on George Orwell's 1984 at the Community College of Vermont. My new, post-911 reading of this book had made it seem ever more relevant, and the image (in the 1984 movie) of Winston Smith crouching by the side of his living room telescreen, trying to write in a journal without being seen, hit me to my core. Yet I found that this generation of students seemed to have an entirely different view on privacy. The messages of the book, while not entirely lost on them, were dated. Their view was, if you put everything "out there," you will be safe. There is no privacy any more, so just get over it!
The last few years of teaching, I struggled to get used to on-line class discussion boards and feedback. Having come to teaching rather late in the day, and having done it as an adjunct (and missed, perhaps, the kind of in-service trainings that long-term, full-time professors were getting in many institutions), I had missed the "piece" about student feedback. My own inner "computer" memory went back 30 years or more, scanned, and was unable to find any scenario where I might have been invited -- or allowed -- to comment on my teachers, good or bad! As a teacher, I welcomed in theory some student feedback. I really didn't see myself as some high muckty-muck passing on wisdom from on high; indeed my classes were quite informal and discussion-based, and students often commented in passing on class or my teaching -- or I could pick up their level of interest from the looks on their faces! It's just that I couldn't yet relate to written, public comments from students. My own experience in my family, school and college level learning had been in the role of the silent student, taking copious notes and studying hard, and just learning what I could from person A or person B, then moving on.
In this blog, I am not a teacher, and readers are not students, so this parallel is flawed, except to the extent that I guess I am trying to explain why I haven't yet clicked on the "allow reader comments" option. It has been all I can do to open up that locked diary at all, and to let people read it. It has been all I can do to stop being the silent student. And now that I am beginning to feel somewhat comfortable with it, yes, my curiosity is growing as to whether people are interested, inspired, bored or whatever with what I am saying. I cannot see your faces! I think I am somewhat stronger as a person, and know (as I didn't earlier in my life) that I will probably survive a range of feedback. So sometime over the next month or two, I suspect you'll suddenly see that option opening up. It will be the morning that all my old reservations seem, well, dated.
