Brainchild

on whether you can teach and learn without a body

Contemplating my body has become a real bore. The deterioration and revision of late middle age can be a shock and a lot to process, and then the data is just running in a loop. I’m sick of talking about it, but it’s like too-spicy potato chips I can’t stop putting in my mouth. A reflex, an ungainly lack of restraint as my body oversteps my brain. If my brain was the only thing here, I bet it would never mortify me, it would never trip and fall.

In the hours when my body itself bores me, I know I am lucky to teach more often online now than in tangible rooms. It’s only my brain in there! I don’t even do videos or voice feedback, and still my online courses are dynamic and rate-my-professor approved. (My students can post work via voice and video recordings if they want, and it’s great, and if they need proof of life I’m there for a Zoom any time.) Especially when I feel sick or don’t sleep or wake up looking like a wreck, it’s convenient to believe my brain is all my students need. I picture a classic sci-fi brain under a glass jar, plugged into some network, running the show.

Narratively, this could go either way – dark corporate manipulation or blissful corporeal freedom. In those hours when my body insists it’s falling apart, but I still have so much good work to do, the light-filled version wins. If my brain kept working independently for a long long time, that’s a new chance for legacy to soothe the sting of childlessness, too… and now we’re just clicks away from sincerely researching cryopreservation and mind uploads.

In the most recent video game-to-prestige TV screened at our house, Fallout, this conceit played more than one starring role. Spoiler alerts again: the overlord energy hologram and bell jar brain are not victorious here. Embodied humans – even ghoulishly decomposed and morally compromised from centuries wandering the post-apocalyptic wasteland – prove stronger and more benevolent. But the fact that the non-bodied continue to be players in so much of our speculative fiction raises the question: is it more than trying to exorcise our mortal fears; is there a world where brain-only becomes a cleaner way to live, a clearer way to lead?

Could be. Until the “world-leading” commercial learning management system gets hacked and everything goes dark in a blink. When Canvas went down my first feeling was relief: through no fault of my own I cannot work at all. Goodnight. By morning fear had moved in, because there was no back-up mode. Because the lesson we’re testing in these stories is actually, I think, that giving all power to a centralized brain without a sentient body is no good. One wrong tap on the glass and it’s total game over, the lonely brain is worthless if its protective cloche shatters or its plug is yanked from the wall. There is only one – awfully delicate – working configuration.

A body, though, can flex. It can keep going with impairments, with only some of its functions, transferring power to one arm or one eye or a whole other sense, etc. It can hook up to other bodies and accomplish things as one composite machine, many possible configurations. When I returned to campus in winter impeded by one still-healing prosthetic hip and the other still not working, I was on my way to the second day of class when the binder in my arms slipped and spilled a stack of notecards – covered with first-day student reflections – all over the hallway floor. I froze stupefied; with the rest of the binder and a Hydro Flask of very hot tea, I knew my body could not bend in any useful way to gather the cards. In the long minute wondering whether I could leave them and return with free hands and manage to scoop them up, a trio of students (not mine, just among the many moving between their own classes) swooped in to collect them without a word and hand them back to me in neat piles.

I nearly cried. There are caring people all around us, supposedly disaffected teenagers included. They are alert and curious – some are even reading this post. Some are hungry in spite of the full-to-choking media feed. And here come the headlines everywhere: Stop Meeting Students Where They Are. Recognize the ones who don’t cling to the feeding tube, entice them all to intellectual hunger even if it hurts.

The iterative process of confusion, endurance, and incremental understanding is what literature professors teach when they assign whole books… The reaction to declining reading skills, poor comprehension, and fragmented attention spans should not be to negotiate or compromise, but to double down on the cure.

It’s the latest way to save the Humanities and maybe all of higher education, The Atlantic’s next idea for how to hold our fingernails longer at the cliff’s edge. But this one: tempting students with invitations to meals that must be chewed slowwwly, processed deliberately with all one’s teeth and tongue, this one calls for all of me to be in the room. To witness how limber the hinges of their minds are, how kind they are to each other for no reason except the belief that they are in community, the instinct to nurture it.

Fully online education can broaden access for students and availability for teachers; for many, the work-from-home prerogative, flexible hours, or anonymity outweigh the collegial and curricular losses. We have worked hard to make online teaching “just as good,” we have defended it across contexts, and yet. For many of us who’ve been at this since the turn of the century, online is not the place we picture when we craft new activities, imagine richer student engagement, talk about what we want our class to be. If body and soul energy management, commuting and family responsibility were all neutralized, most would choose (and some still do in spite of these constraints) to be in the room where it happens.

What happens in there with our bodies? What would the brain under glass (or the lecturing mannequin next to the slideshow) be missing? I picture Jessica and I in the learning community she last posted about, coordinating outfits to up production value, moving in tandem – or at deliberate odds – around the crowded room, keeping eyes and/or ears moving, keeping hands sweeping and showing, standing on a chair to celebrate, squatting to consult up close on a project, slipping into the hall to privately clarify or comfort. I think of how the room hums kind of magically when everyone in it is writing, like an elegant motor; how the invisible wires between us vibrate when compelling lines are read aloud. How a palpable satisfaction drenches us all when presentations are instinctively applauded, poster diagrams on the wall are pointed back to, hand-crafted interpretations crowd the scenery of my office hours. I remember the recent student who lingered long after the last class session to talk and, finally, to fasten the experience with a hug. Even though we approach tentatively and ask first for the contact now, we persist in honoring where we’ve gone together in this full-bodied way. The longer I teach, the larger does human connection loom as the most essential outcome of any course. All these physical encounters are a lot to make up for when only a computer connects us.

Would you believe in the midst of drafting this, I turned one night to my bedside Ursula Le Guin anthology for soothing words on art or nature, and found this in her marvelous essay “Dogs, Cats, and Dancers: Thoughts About Beauty”—

Who I am is certainly part of how I look and vice versa. I want to know where I begin and end, what size I am, and what suits me… I don’t want to be a dismembered brain floating in a glass jar in a sci-fi movie… I am not “in” this body, I am this body.

In the first Covid years, everyone was a floating face, if not just a flat avatar or name/pronouns, in a box. Much gushing ensued when any cat pranced by or kid popped up in the background, and pretty quickly the theme became how much we missed being with each others’ whole selves. Cats and kids weren’t part of before-times meetings, so we must have meant with each others’ three-dimensional bodies. Lots of imaginative, collaborative, and critical work still happened in Zoom, but the universal – seemingly interminable – disembodiment was unnerving. Painful even, to the sensitive or the zesty (the huggers!) among us.

Catching up with a former-teacher friend the week of the Canvas hack, she asked me how it all felt now – pandemic, politics, technology – and my true answer was how really awesome it is to be here for a watershed reimagining of this career, this industry, this cultural cornerstone that is Education. I want to keep wondering and practicing how to make an online environment more human, more material, more dear. My brain can do that. And. I want to seriously consider if the strongest steps forward might be steps back to a time where teaching completely inside a screen is not an option. My darn body is determined to stay in the conversation.