Using ‘Downtime’ To Find Yourself
By Cindy Reitzi
Madison substitute teacher
My friend Teresa spent childhood summers “Up North.” She credits
this reflective time in nature as an essential experience for encountering
and understanding herself today. She is one of those rare Americans who
doesn’t define herself by her job, but rather by her internal life.
She is also of the opinion (one of many definitively stated opinions)
that many children today are neurotic and lost because they haven’t
had an equivalent experience. They haven’t experienced enough “downtime”
to just reflect and be comfortable with themselves and their thoughts.
Furthermore, they are bombarded with constant, external noise that makes
“hearing” themselves difficult.
In fact, we are all buffeted by external messages that proclaim, this
is success, love, beauty, or excitement. The defenses we have against
these external definitions of ourselves, against images that feed our
fears, or insist on others’ expectations of what our bodies, lives,
professions, and values should be are twofold: a critical truth detector
and a strong internal sense of ourselves.
Indeed, this is the quintessential teenage drama to be resolved: define
yourself or be defined by others.
Teresa is on to something. I’ve met passive students who have no
“internal” zest for life. Students act this way for reasons
ranging from depression, family disruption, constant moving, school failure,
or disinterest. Still, they are students who are so reluctant to learn
that picking up a book is like picking up a 50-pound weight, with as much
resistance. They are students who are always bored and who wait: they
wait for you to feed them information, wait for someone to give them a
pen and paper because they didn’t bring any to class, wait for someone
to “entertain” them.
When you ask them what they do in their free time, they don’t have
jobs, hobbies, play music or sports, do art, read or write, or entertain
friends. They don’t do homework. What do they do? Watch a lot of
TV.
TV is certainly part of the “noise,” and I wonder how it affects
those students. I’m not talking moderate TV viewing; I’m talking
TV addiction. I wonder what a relentless diet of external images does
to our capacity to generate our own internal images. Does it cripple our
imagination? Do we hunger for preprogrammed images and fantasy rather
than challenge ourselves to create our own?
Professor Barry Sanders, who teaches the History of Ideas at Claremont
College in Pasadena, California, was interviewed on a PBS Frontline program.*
Sanders believes that TV is inadvertently creating a new sort of human
being:
“We are producing generations of kids without imagination, with
an inability to conjure their own images … because television does
it for them. And that’s amazingly important if we ever care about
anything like … hope. The best counter that a person has to images
… or notions of violence out in the world or of disease or of despair
… is being able to conjure the image of another world, of a different
world, of a world that’s filled with hope.”
Sanders is also concerned that young people need constant noise.
“The television is acting as an electronic eraser. Young people grow
up now with the idea that there has to be sound, at least sound, all the
time, and better yet, if it’s accompanied by pictures.
“The notion of ‘downtime,’ has been erased … eliminated.”
For Sanders, the elimination of “downtime” has consequences
for our capacity to think about the future and to change our lives.
“You don’t get to meet yourself. And the fact that you don’t
get to meet yourself and be introduced to yourself is very, very important.
That you don’t get to narrate to yourself very often in quiet moments
about what you’ve done in the past and what you want to do that’s
different from that in the future.
“Television creates a remotest kind of behavior where if I don’t
like you, I can click you off.”
The oddest thing about watching Frontline was watching people on TV watch
TV. Social critic Barbara Ehrenreich has commented that the reason you
never see that is because it would be boring to watch. In the case of
Paul Martin, it was chilling.
Frontline put TV cameras in three homes in Hudson, New York, to monitor
their TV use. Whenever the TV went on, so did Frontline’s cameras.
Paul watched limitless hours of TV with his mother’s blessing. He
didn’t go outside because they lived in a “bad” neighborhood
and Mom felt it was dangerous. Paul was a “nice” 10-year-old
and his mother was protecting him, but Paul still had problems at school
controlling his temper and not using his fists.
The most disturbing thing was how much TV Paul watched. Frontline clocked
his TV consumption at 15 hours a day on weekends. Besides eating, this
was Paul’s life.
As Paul Martin watched, zombified by the TV screen, Sanders said:
“Life for that kid is not going on inside the child, but it’s
out there someplace in that little box.”
As for life in the classroom, we hope that life is going on inside our
students and not someplace else. The best models we can give our passive
students are teachers with active internal lives, not vicarious lives
“borrowed” from television or videos. Teachers are not “images”
of successful, educated people; they need to be the embodiment of successful,
educated people. Passive students need examples of teachers who lead active
lives … from the inside out.
* Frontline, “Does TV Kill?” 1996.