Thinking Allowed

In this week’s Thinking Allowed, English teacher Dr Nina Cook writes about the post-lockdown classroom. This powerful and challenging article presents impressive insights into the lockdown experience, particularly for teenagers and the challenges that they and their teachers face in assisting them to re-adjust, re-connect and re-focus.

A Dance to the Compass Points: writing about place in the post-lockdown classroom

In an article in The New Yorker, from April 4, 2022, Ian Frasier tells the story of a Russian scientist who stabbed another Russian scientist at a research station in Antarctica. Frasier points out that crime is uncommon on that continent, but what made this one even more unusual, was that one scientist, Sergei Savitsky, had attacked another, Oleg Beloguzov, for giving away the endings of books. At the isolated station, run by Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, the two men had been together for many months. Savitsky was reading books from the library to pass the time, and Beloguzov kept telling him the endings; finally, Savitsky snapped and stabbed Beloguzov in the chest with a kitchen knife. Beloguzov was flown to a hospital in Chile, where he recovered. Authorities brought Savitsky to St. Petersburg, arrested him, and charged him with attempted murder. The date of the incident was October 2018. What might have seemed crazy in 2018, no longer seems so bizarre in our “post-pandemic” world.

In another article in The New Yorker, from March 24, 2021, Jill Lepore wonders about how plague stories begin, and what happens next. “All the world is topsy-turvy,” a character in one story says. “And it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.” As the pestilence spreads, people grow fearful of one another, families closet themselves in their houses, stores take in their wares, schoolhouses bolt their doors. The rich flee, the poor sicken, the hospitals fill. The arts wither. Society descends into chaos, government into anarchy. Finally, in the last stage of this seemingly inevitable regression, in which history runs in reverse, books and even the alphabet are forgotten, knowledge is lost, and humans are reduced to brutes.

Well, hopefully, we are not quite there yet.

Scientists do, however, talk of the “Groundhog Day” effect of lockdown and subsequent changes to memory and cognitive ability. Not the sudden, violent outbursts that Frasier recalls, or the brutish dehumanisation that Lepore writes of, but a gradual withering away of our synapses, a flickering and then, at the swish of the ambient light of a screen, a sudden whoosh and the lightning strike of the prefrontal cortex. While there’s a lack of data on the Australian lockdown experience, a study of Italians who were locked down for about two months last year, recorded in the journal Neurological Sciences, found an increase in distractions and that mind wandering was common. This study of 4000 respondents found 30 per cent had experienced some degree of change in their everyday cognition. Some of the common problems were memory problems, such as where individuals left their mobile phone, trouble in focusing attention, and losing focus when trying to read a book or watching something online. In an article entitled “Why lockdown is making it hard for you to concentrate,” Diane Nazaroff quotes Professor Brett Hayes from UNSW’s School of Psychology who says that people found themselves, “literally starting one job and without thinking about it, going off and starting a second job without finishing the first one.” He points out that it was, “also worst for people who had emotional issues, who were feeling depressed, or stressed and anxious; they had more of these symptoms.”

Most of us have had some cognitive decline since the lockdown. But imagine what it is like for a 16-year-old who has spent a lot of the last two years on a screen, swiping from one site to another, as they became increasingly isolated and bored with Zoom lessons and teachers valiantly trying to sustain their pupils’ already short attention spans. The cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner in 2002, was among the first to propose that attention is a limited cognitive resource and that some cognitive processes require more attention than others. This is particularly the case for activities involving the conscious control of cognitive processes (such as reading or writing), involving what Kahneman calls “System 2” thinking that requires attention and mental energy. Research in cognitive sciences today confirms what we know intuitively: studying requires attention, time and availability of mind. Not surprisingly, then, in a world full of messages about the dangers of the pandemic, students found it difficult to focus on their studies and most struggled with quality reading or writing.

Add to this dispiriting mixture the fact that the internet exposes teenagers not only to supportive friendships but also to bullying, threats, despairing conversations about mental health, and a slurry of unsolvable global problems – what Derek Thompson in “Why American Teens Are So Sad”, April 11, 2022, calls “a carnival of negativity.” Social media places in every teen’s pocket a battle royal for scarce popularity that can displace hours of sleep and makes many teens, especially girls, feel worse about their body and life. Thompson points out that if we amplify these existing trends with a global pandemic and an unprecedented period of social isolation, then “suddenly, the remarkable rise of teenage sadness doesn’t feel all that mysterious, does it?”

In, “How Should One Read a Book?”, Virginia Woolf argues that:

To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice.

We know a lot of adolescents are struggling to read, let alone to read well. In order to get my students reading again, I had to get them to become “accomplices”, collaborators, find pieces that would allow them to learn not only how to think about place, but how to read and write about it as well. Woolf goes on to say:

“One cannot write the most ordinary little story, attempt to describe the simplest event, without coming up against difficulties that the greatest of novelists have had to face.”

So why not take “a dance to the compass points”, find writing that explores place and see how that can help those struggling to connect with the world return to it with some tools that may help them process it? I went to a quote from TS Eliot’s “Four Quartets”:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

I wanted the class to consider what the nature of these explorations might be, and what Eliot means by that very complicated verb, “know”. I also showed an image of Ben Quilty’s “Fairy Bower Rorschach” from 2012.

Quilty’s painting is of a waterfall at Bundanoon in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales near where Quilty lives and works. A beauty spot, Fairy Bower Falls, was photographed from the mid-19th century. There are historical images of men and women in full colonial splendour with parasols and top hats at the foot of the falls. But Fairy Bower Falls is also the site of a massacre of the Indigenous population in the early 19th century. By rorschaching this image of such a precarious site, Quilty asks the viewer to reconsider their conception of this landscape as a place of idyllic beauty. The duplication and damage of the image echoes the disturbing and violent history this site has witnessed. This was a way of investigating how the painting might complicate our understanding of our relationship to place.

To spark further debate, and to get students arguing, I gave them a quote from the ever-reliable George Saunders:

“No place works any different than any other place, really, beyond mere details. The universal human laws – need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain – are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture.”

Since the point of the unit is to look at how our relationship to place has shifted as the world has changed and how various characters relate to place in the modern world, I wanted to challenge Saunders’ notion, that, “No place works any different than any other place, really, beyond mere details.” To do this the question of how we write about place, and the various ways writers have talked about responding to place, became central. I thought about Romantic, “sublime” responses to the world: being emotionally overwhelmed by the awe and wonder of the natural landscape and the imaginative and transformative reliving of this through verse. In The Luminous Solution by Charlotte Wood, she calls this “the rapture.”

Woods describes how artists and writers have always turned to nature for solace, inspiration and refreshment. She explains that several times in her life, “in some natural place, I’ve experienced what at another point in history might have been deemed a kind of ecstatic religious swoon.” For Wood:

Rapture is not too strong a word for these moments. Even if I’ve been with others at the time, it hasn’t felt that way, for the feeling was so private and inexpressible. I’ve felt it walking through a shady glade in a Lisbon botanical garden, and on seeing the enormous head of a humpback whale corkscrew silently up from the water near our tourist boat. I’ve felt it walking in the softly falling snow in a Tasmanian national park, and even when squatting to pee in the dry grass outside a rudimentary cabin in the bush where I once spent a week working on a book.

Wood mentions the creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who says a stunning view is not ‘a silver bullet’ but whose research has shown that “when persons with prepared minds find themselves in beautiful settings, they are more likely to find new connections among ideas, and new perspectives.” I love the idea of “a prepared mind” and wanted the class to think about what implications this might have for accessing their own responses to a place that has in some ways shifted their sense of scale and perspective. This could be in the city, or the natural world, but I wanted the focus to be on the emotional response the place evokes. 

For a completely different way of observing a place, for the objective, reportorial, recording eye, I went to the opening of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin:

“From my window, the deep solemn massive street Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied facades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Someday, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”

This classic conceit of a writer as a “camera” invites investigation about whether we can ever be “passive” and remotely monitor our response to an environment. It also offers students a wonderful way to consider what their own conceit, their own “I”, as a writer might be.

So, this consideration of the emotional and the observational was the starting point for our exploring, a way out of “Groundhog Day” and the madness that has, and still does, surround us. We have felt alone, isolated, and our environment, our sense of place, shifted and problematised as we became fixed within it. Aloneness, however, isn’t the same as loneliness, and loneliness isn’t the same as depression. But more aloneness (including from heavy screen use) and more loneliness (including from school closures) might be alleviated slightly if we allow students to get away from the screen, and reconnect with the world by both observing and emotionally, imaginatively recreating the place we are in.

Dr Nina Cook

References:

Frazier, I, (2022), ‘The Literature of Cabin Fever. How lockdown fits into the canon, from the Mad Trapper of Rat River to Huckleberry Finn to The Shining’, The New Yorker, April 11.

Lepore, J, (2021), How Do Plague Stories End? In the literature of contagion, when society is finally free of disease, it’s up to humanity to decide how to begin again,’ The New Yorker, March 24.

Santangelo, G., Baldassarre, I., Barbaro, A. et al. ‘Subjective cognitive failures and their psychological correlates in a large Italian sample during quarantine/self-isolation for COVID-19.’ Neurol Sci 42, 2625–2635 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-021-05268-1

Nazaroff, D, (2021), ‘Why lockdown is making it hard for you to concentrate’, UNSW Newsroom, August 11.

Thompson, D, (2022), ‘Why American Teens Are So Sad’, The Atlantic Monthly, April 11.

Woolf, V, (1932), ‘How Should One Read a Book? Read as if one were writing it,’ The Common Reader, Hogarth Press.

Eliot, T. S., (2002), Collected Poems 1909-1962, Faber.

Wood, C, (2021), The Luminous Solution. Creativity, Resilience and the Inner Life, Allen & Unwin

Isherwood, C, (1939), Goodbye to Berlin, Vintage Classics.