This was the title of an e-mail from my mom to me that included this clip.
My response: “OMG. Just, OMG.”
One of the great things about teaching high schoolers is that you never have any pretensions about being cool. Being a TV personality, unfortunately, doesn’t come with that particular perk.
When my husband was in grade school, he remembers his teacher casually mentioning once that she didn’t own a television set.
“I was shocked,” he says. “I thought, so, what do you DO all day?”
Now he takes more than a little pride in mentioning the fact that we also don’t own a television. When we got married, my parents generously gave us their old one, but we never used it except for movies. I refused to pay for cable, something I saw as a downward spiral ending in hundreds of dollars a month, so we only got a few channels. My sister used to watch the Ravens games, which she said were blurry but at an acceptable level. We may have turned the news on once or twice during a hurricane.
When we purchased a new computer, we discovered the screen was almost as big as the television we owned, so we gave away the television. We continue to watch movies. But television has crept back in, thanks to the Internet, where almost every show can be found for free, via legal means or otherwise.
I’m not sure how I feel about it. For awhile, we only watched LOST, which I still maintain is the best show I’ve seen in a long time (and maybe ever.) We’d go over to our friends’ house (or, more recently, my parents’ house, after converting them one summer) and watch, discuss, rail at the lack of answers and the plethora of questions. I liked the fact that watching television became a planned social event, not just something to do to pass the time.
But then I started watching a few shows out of curiosity, mostly to keep up with my students. Is Grey’s Anatomy really that wretched? (It’s worse. You have no idea.) Is Desperate Housewives that vapid? (Likewise.) Is Scrubs that funny? (No, but according to many of my friends, I haven’t given it enough of a chance.) Is the Office? (A resounding YES!) For some reason, I’ve become totally hooked on The Mentalist; it’s not a groundbreaking show, but it’s funny and dramatic and I’m interested in the psychological aspects of the protagonist’s investigative technique.
What I’m starting to realize, though, is that I’m getting more tolerant. I’ll sit through stuff I never would have before. Last summer we watched several seasons of Weeds, which was funny at times but really not very high-quality and certainly didn’t affirm the kind of values we have. This year Rob’s been watching Flash Forward, and I notice that I usually end up paying more attention to the crossword puzzle or my pile of vocabulary quizzes than to the screen. I don’t want that.
So yes, we don’t have a television. And yes, I brought the subject up myself, but not so I could brag about it. Because I think in the end, it doesn’t matter. More and more people will be following the Biltons’ lead and ditching TV for . . . TV. In a different form. I thank thee, Father, that I am not like other men.
If laughter is the best medicine, laughing at yourself is even more so. I’ve written about Gavin before; yesterday he was beside himself while trying to learn a new piece, and each time he was stuck he’d groan loudly and slump down on the bench, exclaiming, “I can’t DO it!” The similarity to Don Music of Sesame Street was so great that I grabbed my laptop to show him this video:
He laughed, and although he was still frustrated, he now made a great show of throwing himself at the piano keys, knowing his mother and I would find it funny, instead of turning the frustration on himself. Mission accomplished. Carole would be proud.
Writing this from my in-laws’ beach condo, I am sitting on the floor next to the TV. (I’m not on the couch, which is far more comfortable, because I have to sit here to take advantage of the free, possibly-pirated Internet access.) Rob is half-reading for his last semester of graduate school, half-watching an eager chef prepare an Old Bay Butter for a lobster boil. Occasionally my husband emits exclamations of reproach or excitement: “Honey, LOOK how much fat was in that bacon!”
I am able to successfully ignore most of the show (and honestly, I don’t mind cooking shows in general; they’re one of the reasons I occasionally wish we had a TV.) But in between bouts of artery-clogging enthusiasm, the commercials assault me like angry darts, piercing the balloon of my thoughts: loud, ugly consumerism, pelting your ears with furious speed until the show picks up again. There is no time to absorb the information, no time to think about what I just learned and what it means.
Yes, I realize this is a cooking show, not a Joyce novel. But this constant input of information is something we encounter all the time, and a lack of think time almost always accompanies it.
As a disenfranchised Creative Writing teacher, I want to encourage my students to think beyond mere comprehension of what they read. What do they think about the characters, the moral, the situations in which the authors place their creations? How do these books matter to them?
At Michael’s last week, I found some pretty notebooks on sale and bought a dozen, one for each member of the class. Somehow, this tiny personal expenditure transformed an assignment into a gift: the students clustered around them with squeals of approval, eagerly tearing off the plastic and inscribing their names on the covers. I told them I wouldn’t grade them except for completion, and they’d have five or ten minutes to think and write just for themselves. Sharing was optional.
The first day, I asked if anyone wanted to read a response to the question about a “secret life” they might lead or like to lead. No takers. But the second day, I asked if they’d ever been part of a relationship that was discouraged by their friends or family.
No hands for a couple of beats, and then a girl in the back shyly told us about a guy she’d dated whom everyone had told her was trouble. Guess what? He was trouble. Several of her friends smiled in support of her — probably the same ones who had told her to stay away from him.
Then a girl in the front told a very different story. She had been friends with another girl in middle school, one who was famous for arguing with authority figures and ignoring obligations. After some time, she asked the girl why she was so intent on causing trouble, and gently suggested that if she tried respect first, she might find it would come back to her.
Over time, she said, her friend began to change. And eventually she thanked her for that conversation — thanked her for being a good example as well as a friend. My student’s voice grew thick as she it formed the words, and there were murmurs of approval from her classmates, who learned an important lesson: Sometimes the rest of the world is wrong. Sometimes the light can overcome the darkness.
My ulterior motive for this project? At the end of the year, I’ll have twelve pretty notebooks full of material for my literary magazine. But I also hope, truly, that this exercise will give them time to think.
Today marks the end of an era. The last episode of Reading Rainbow will air:
The show’s run is ending, Grant explains, because no one — not the station, not PBS, not the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — will put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the show’s broadcast rights.
The article goes on to blame the Bush administration (this is NPR, after all) for establishing such an attitude. Personally, I think the NEA should have been disbanded years ago, and it’s absurd to continue the program in the face of the current economic stress. Furthermore, it should not be television’s job to teach kids to read (or even to love reading, as the article claims.) That’s the domain of people like me.
Political invective aside, however, I have to say that the demise of the show makes me sad. My family didn’t have cable TV until I was 13 (I remember this because they got cable WHILE I was away at summer camp. The injustice!) So I grew up on public television programming, for the most part. Reading Rainbow was one of our favorites, and I doubt that anyone my age, even the ones who grew up with cable, wouldn’t be able to sing the theme song if prompted. Remember? “Butterfly in the skyyyyyyyy . . . ”
And now you have something to sing for the rest of the day.