We’re halfway through “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia Butler, and we’ve arrived at a crucial turning point in the plot. The main character, Lauren Olamina, loses her family and home to an arson attack. I wanted my students to fully experience the severity of this loss, so instead of continuing with a workshop model I’d been using throughout the unit thus far, I decided to read to the class:
I sat where I was for three weary, terrifying hours. Nothing happened to me, but I could see and hear things happening. There were people moving around the hills, sometimes silhouetting themselves against the sky as they ran or walked over the hills…I heard a lot of gunfire–individual shots and short bursts of automatic weapons fire…
“Why are we reading this?” a student interrupts. The class remains quiet. I look up to see most resting their hands against their heads. They look bored and glance up at me with their faces downcast. I see some of them begin to turn their phones over, and others reach into their pockets.
“Because it’s important. This world isn’t that far off from ours,” I say.
Another student responds, “But it’s not that bad.”
“But what if one day it is?” I ask. “Don’t you think that matters to you?”
Another student shrugs. Another stares at me blankly.
Parable of the Sower was written in 1993, yet some would argue Butler’s predictions are bone-chillingly accurate. Unfortunately, none of that matters if the only thing students want to do is go back to their phones.
For many of my students, reading is not a precursor to revolutionary action, but a cumbersome task that is always a preamble to another tedious assessment. Even if this is the case, reading has been shown to be a tool for building empathy. Empathy is how we learn to care for people we will never meet. In this case, the expediency of technology has created a sense of immediate gratification that stands opposite to the empathy that reading can cultivate.
When I talk to my coworkers about the apathy I notice in my classroom, we realize that the large chunks of writing, the big words and the complexity of Butler’s ideas are all turnoffs for our students. When students are simply met with a page that has a lot of words on it, disinterest is immediate.
I recognize it is not my place to mirror their complacency but to model what it would look like to care. But how do I get them to care when I can’t even get them to see the value of a book that clearly shows us the effects of our collective negligence? It’s impossible to reach this empathy that reading can provide without first helping students gain tools to build the mental and emotional stamina to engage with complex texts.
Building Boredom and Executive Functioning
While people are not yet roaming the streets en masse scavenging for food and water, around the world, people are doing just that as I write this. In our country, our democracy is at stake as well. Despite all this, Generation Alpha cares less and less.
Lately, it appears that students are more interested in rapidly scrolling through their friends’ stories, checking their likes and direct messages and uploading stories with filters on social media apps. Their impulses are wired to do this and, in my opinion, focus too much on the self, the immediacy of tasks and the imminent gratification from likes — it does not allow students to sit deeply and meaningfully in someone else’s emotions and experiences.
Students will reach for their phones during transitions, in between reading passages, whole-group discussions and during moments of boredom. While taking phones away is a first step, this doesn’t address the problem — the immediate withdrawal in front of a dense, complex text. Reversing these trends requires students to lean into the practice of boredom.
Boredom, despite the negative connotations, is a discipline that frees the mind from the perceived need for constant activity, and research shows that doing nothing can lead to inspiration, imagination and presence. Boredom is a feeling that students need to learn to befriend to tackle a complex text — because being bored should not be a reason to miss out on a thought-provoking reading experience, such as the one “Parable of the Sower” provides.
Boredom should be practiced daily and explicitly in classrooms. Set a timer and just sit there with your students. Put phones away and leave nothing on the desk. Sit there. Do nothing. This trains the mind to refuse any impulses and reach for distractions from the present moment.
In my classroom, I’ve implemented sustained silent reading (SSR) with no comprehension assessments to build reading stamina and help students find a genuine love for reading. Like boredom, this practice also requires silence and presence. Although a student’s mind might wander during this time, the expectation that they are silent and interfacing with words demands self-regulation.
Boredom and SSR are also connected to executive functioning because they demand that students be present, focused and control their impulses. When students are only allowed to sit in class and think about their thoughts or look at a book, it is a necessary first step to reading dense texts because reading requires focus. With time, the impulse to pull out a phone or withdraw from difficult tasks will hopefully be mitigated when students have learned that being bored or still is not such a bad thing.
Going Down Reading
To be honest, on most days, I feel helpless. Even when phones are away, the disconnect remains. And in a sense, the disconnect is incredibly valid: despite all the activism, there is little change that students can cling to. If a young person is looking at the gaps between social movements and the continued fracturing of our world, it makes sense to give up and focus on the self.
Some of my solutions have been to couple parts of “Parable of the Sower” with current and local events. In the Bay Area, poverty rates are extremely high with the soaring cost of living. In San Francisco, homelessness has long been a crisis. The wealth gap is immense and we’ve seen the effects of climate change with extreme heat in parts of the Bay. Through my efforts, I have gotten students to see the correlations between these harsh realities and the circumstances of Lauren’s world. But even then, the apathy remains.
“What’s the point? The world is going to end anyway,” they tell me.
And if it were true that the world would end, there would still be a period after the collapse of society where all we’ll have left is each other. Then, it’ll come down to empathy and community. When Lauren finally succeeds at building her community, she tells them:
…If we’re willing to work, our chances are good here. I’ve got some seed in my pack…What we have to do at this point is more like gardening than farming. Everything will have to be done by hand–composting, watering, weeding, picking worms or slugs…We work together, we can defend ourselves, and we can protect the kids. A community’s first responsibility is to protect its children–the ones we have now and the one we will have…
Although the work of building community is daunting, as Lauren says, we must protect our children. They will bear the brunt of a broken world. We protect them by empowering them with the tools needed to survive. Empathy is the tool for survival in a world shaped by individualism, but empathy cannot be practiced with poor impulse control. Empathy requires discipline, and discipline comes from facing and befriending discomfort.
In my ideal classroom, students are present, reading the words and forming connections with themselves and the world. They push themselves to engage with dense paragraphs. They annotate. They may struggle, but they appreciate the long process of learning and understanding. They walk away thinking about the world with expanded horizons because they’ve just experienced a life that is not theirs. But the presence that leads to this empathy will only come if a student is self-regulated enough to manage the impulses that create disengagement. If a student thinks all answers should come immediately from a single tool in their hand — their phones — disengagement is inevitable.
But I know that as long as I am in the classroom, my duty as a teacher is to model care and empathy, regardless of my frustrations. I am still comforted by that one student who will see the value of reading a novel that tells us who we will become if we forget about each other, for if we do not have each other, we have nothing.
