As an educator, I wage a daily battle with technological advances that endanger the voice of history's cylindrical witness. I struggle daily to instill my classroom of gifted students with an appropriate esteem for the common pencil, when alluring computer keyboards and monitors click, flash and produce with a spontaneity that maintains pace with their quick-silver minds.
Why slow down to listen to the rhythms and whispers of the past when the future beckons with such jubilant immediacy?
Because my students are gifted – intellectually as well as perceptually – the possibility exists that they will come to understand the plight of the pencil and the ramifications of its demise on the spirit of the creative soul. In a surge of mindfulness, they might even abandon their pencils of mechanical origins, for fear of contaminating their work's organic flow.
In memory of literary icon Kurt Vonnegut, whose wit and wisdom offer an exaggerated vision of the end results of various human follies, my more fanciful gifted students eagerly embraced the opportunity to take a satiric glimpse into a pencil-less society several generations hence, which might go something like this:
Upon the obsolescence of the pencil in the year 4157, a race of humans developed, sporting an evolutionary change that disallowed the tip of the thumb to meet the tip of any other finger– a hand that assumed a perpetually perfect position for skillful dexterity on a keyboard.
Sadly, because of this anatomical change, certain seemingly eternal hand gestures became relics of another age. Gone were the "A-OK" hand sign that requires the thumb and forefinger to meet in a circuitous fashion, as well as the ever-optimistic "thumbs-up" signal, which needs the fingers to curl into the palm.
Piano players would thrive in this newly evolved pencil-free society, as would harp players, but players of stringed instruments that require the use of a bow would fall out of favor.
Gifted kids do get carried away sometimes.
What we must not lose, whether in the 21st century or the 41st, are the psychic nerve ends in our fingertips that sense vibration and voice in the wood and graphite of a pencil. With that loss, the thread holding us alongside our predecessors would fray and snap, flinging generations of humans into a future that has no foundation.
Poets and politicians, artists and innovators, silenced with the loss of the energy that vibrates through the cells of a small cedar cylinder.
Let the music play on.
Shannon South is an advanced academics specialist at Hurst Hills Elementary School in the Hurst-Euless-Bedford district and a Teacher Voices volunteer columnist. Her e-mail address is shannonsouth@hebisd .edu.
