As a secularist with a will to believe in something greater, I received a treat today. As I sat by a small stream in a park near my house and began to read, I was interrupted by three small boys who gallivanted down the side of a small bank towards the water. Shouting in their outdoor voices, their energy was palpable. Suddenly more kids were bounding down the bank, kicking up dirt and beaming with excitement. I wondered if these were my local neighborhood kids and why they weren’t in school; by my estimation they were about 7-10 years old. Was this a daycare? Where was the teacher?

She appeared jaunting down the bank with a wide grin on her face. Internally, I was relieved because I knew I didn’t have to be responsible for anything that went wrong as they ran and jumped about the stream– carrying on as kids do… as I used to (and still do on occasion if I’m in a light enough mood). Erin, the teacher, let me know that they will be there for about an hour. I was welcome to stay, but if the noise or distraction bothered me then she wouldn’t blame me for leaving. I thanked her for letting me know and said to “play on!”

While I tried to read my book, I was distracted. Gosh darn it, I was distracted. But I was distracted in the most pleasant of ways. As a graduate student and instructor, I very rarely interact with children, and my area of research corresponds with the effects that modern day technology has on culture, community, and even pedagogy. Over the last several weeks, I have been consuming information about how in-person relationships are degrading, wounded by the digital landscape. One of my college student’s asked me recently if we can read something a little more hopeful… “I’m looking for it,” I told her. 

Well I found it in the joy of these kids. The kids were full of life, energy, and imagination. As they played in the stream, they talked to one another, making eye contact and asking each other politely for help with this task or that objective. One boy was nervous to leap across the stream. What if he slipped and fell? Several other kids encouraged him. They didn’t make fun, but earnestly tried to help him leap across the stream. He decided against it. Later, this very same boy was wading up to his waist in the freezing snow run off of the mountain stream, bolder than ever. His quick evolution was an emotional triumph that inspired me. While he trudged through the water, other groups of students worked as a community to build a stick bridge across the water. The metaphoric resonance of building bridges instead of walls resonated with me.

With my undergraduate students, we are studying Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why we Expect More from our Technology and Less from Eachother. In class, we discuss how we become more accustomed to our digital lives than our tangible shared realities in the physical world. Digital walls in the form of laptops separate the students from one another. The students don’t talk to each other before or after class unless I prompt them to–it’s easier to scroll on Instagram than to talk to a classmate. Eye contact seems harder for them than it did the younger students. Laughter in the classroom is a bit of a surprise. And the lack of energy is a puzzle I frequently struggle to solve. Yesterday, I asked them if they wanted to go outside for class because the weather was warm. They didn’t want to, it would have been a little chilly, some said. After my experience today, I’m wondering if I should take them to a stream and have them discuss the reading as we collectively make a physical bridge over tumultuous digital waters.