June 25, 2013
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Too much Technology!
Thanks for the comment, Ann. The chapel talk was for students who are just beginning to study English, so I had to keep it simple and purposely repetitive so that kids who didn't get the points the first time around would perhaps get them the second or third time. I would handle things much differently for a listening audience which had more familiarity with the language.
I would really rather just talk to the girls without the technology, but the powers that be now want the English Bible reading up on the screen. People seem to be forgetting how to function without screens. In some ways having things on a screen is helpful, but it also makes for lazy listeners who don't try to organize information in their own heads. (Or is it lazy me who doesn't want the distraction of messing with a PowerPoint presentation? I only had two slides!) They don't have to, because it is all done for them on the screen. School has an English lounge where students can come and talk to the teachers, play games or watch English DVDs. Lately a bunch of first year students come in and want to see iCarly, which is also about technology. They don't have a clue about what is going on with the story line. They just watch the images and screech out giggles. What's that?? On my lounge days I purposely put nothing in the DVD player and try to encourage the students to play a game with me, a HUMAN BEING! People are getting very wrong ideas about the nature of reality. What is on a screen is not real, but a processed, packaged, edited, artificial product. In music videos we have artificial stages with artificial lighting where the performers dress up like clowns at best and sing about Godless themes. The cameras cut from one shot to another so quickly that we don't have a chance to see that the performance is not so wonderful or exciting as it might appear. Society tells us that it's all fantastic when it ain't necessarily so. Everybody gets up in the morning and puts one pants leg on a time. The only difference is in the technological packaging. Movies also have graphics for graphic's sake. There is no real strong plot, only a string of artificial images strung together at breakneck speed.
Lately I am finding myself irritated with students who don't know how to listen to simple directions. I can explain in two languages and they still don't get it, and I just about have to go around to each of twenty or so students and give individual explanations. Some of them don't know how to listen, period. It's as if they think it's all right to talk over me just as they would talk over a dialogue emanating from a screen.
