Though I haven’t officially started teaching yet, I have been living on the bucolic campus for nearly a month now. Sure, it’s summer and there aren’t any kids or even a daily routine, but I feel more insulated from the world. Like many people who work in a technological field (as I did previously), I was simply inundated with information and news. Like some node on a ganglia of desk-driving, sedentary leaches I absorbed the news, software releases, security reports and other digital detritus of the modern world. But now I am disconnected and reveling in my new idyllic environs and I am wondering if it’s some choice I made unconsciously or am I naturally and healthily withdrawing from the intoxicating ether.
It’s not that I don’t have the means to acquire the information. Certainly as much as before, I have high-speed internet access, 80 channels of digital TV, and all the radio I care to listen to, but I find myself not needing those things as much. I just don’t feel the need to be as up-to-date on the latest releases of my favorite FTP client anymore. I don’t need to know just what a piece of ignorant white trash Pfc. England is. While the cable may be blaring and my email constantly checking itself, I could be immersed, but I’m not.
It’s not that I don’t have the time. That may be the case in a week or so when the students arrive, but now my days are as free as they have ever been, but I seem to be filling them with things like walks with my dog and watching the downstairs neighbors children play on the playground outside my window. With only a little planning to do each day, I could sit and absorb the 24-hour news channels while I surf the backwaters of the web yearning to find that perfect piece of open-source software, but I don’t.
I think it comes down to my finally finding the thing that can fully occupy my mind: teaching. I simply can’t stop thinking about lesson plans and classroom layouts, writing exercises and vocabulary quizzes. It is beginning to define me and my lifestyle and I think that I am perfectly OK with that. So, I guess it’s a gentle combination of not needing to fill my brain with the endless flow of information because I am full enraptured with the subject at hand and some subconscious switchover of my internal wiring to be interested in all the new opportunities that are ahead of me now.
The truly interesting twist is that I am now feeling that pull of wanting to use and create technology instead of simply consuming it. I want to program applications, think of solutions, and refine processes instead of installing some new bauble to toy with. I want to adapt the technology around me to the open doors I am faced with in the hopes that I can create useful and thoughtful things. Perhaps that’s the real truth of it. Have I evolved to some higher level of techie? Have I made the jump from an implementer of others’ creations to some sort of creator? The teacher within seems to be coming out ready to create and mold rather than consume and regurgitate. Whatever it is, I’m liking it.
This post brought to you by insomnia.