Because 30 Rock is Kind of Smart

I was going to do another post where I do my advice from an editor thing, but I have a different subject on my mind that doesn’t have anything to do with writing or journals.

This semester I am teaching several sections of Rhet. and Comp. on two different campuses in central Texas. While my main objective is to teach these students how to write and communicate more effectively, I also try to include a good amount of discussion about the content of our reading.

During these discussions I come to one strange conclusion over and over again – I wish my students watched more TV. I know this sounds crazy. As an educator I am suppose to bemoan the perils of watching television and encourage my students to do nothing but read James Joyce. But I don’t. More often than not I find myself telling my students they should watch shows like The Office, Arrested Development, Weeds, The Wire (I know that Arrested Development is no longer on television but I love that show and feel it needs mentioning).

But haven’t we, as educators, won the fight if our students are no longer watching the dreaded boob tube? Not at all. From what I can tell the students have traded general TV watching for two things: videogames and reality television. Both males and females admit to playing a couple of hours worth of videogames a day, especially those that live in the dorms. My males generally watch ESPN and the girls watch Next Top Model (so do some of my males they just won’t admit it in the classroom).

Granted my main annoyance is that when I quote Scrubs or Friends or say: There a-loo-sions, Michael, my students have no idea what I am talking about. But beyond that, most of NBC’s shows throw in references to politics and current events, CSI had an episode about dog fighting when that scandal arose, and who knows how much they could learn by watching even one or two episodes of The Daily Show every week. I think we’ve entered into a culture where watching some amount of television is as important as reading the newspaper was twenty years ago. And I’m not talking about just news shows, but watching sitcoms and dramas to help us a gain a cultural context to the world we’re interacting with.

It just amazes me how much information is at my students’ finger tips, yet they have no clue what is going on outside of their own world. Sure, they’ve all seen the video of the kid in Japan get hit in the head with a skateboard, but they have no idea why we’re fighting in Iraq or even who the presidential candidates are. Maybe these are the typical ravings of a new teacher or maybe I just feel that I should be able to relate to my students a little better, but either way, I’m seriously thinking about assigning two hours of TV watching before class on Wednesday.