"Now, select your printer"
It has been cold here in Fredericton. We’ve had a good, old fashioned cold snap—the kind I was starting to worry had left us for good. I grew up in the former town of Chatham, New Brunswick, the Irish, Catholic part of the Acadian Peninsula. It’s always colder and snowier “up north” than it is here in the pleasant Welastuk River Valley “down south” where I now live.
The cold snap has been reminding me of the year I remember most vividly from my childhood. It was the year I was in sixth grade. We had a cold snap that January and February, too—it was minus thirty degrees Celsius, in my surely exaggerated and distorted child’s memory, every day for what seemed like forever.1 School at St. Michael’s was cancelled at least twice—once for frozen pipes, and another time because the wind chill reached the magic number of minus forty Celsius, which triggered school closures.
The Miramichi River is brackish in what is now the City of Miramichi, because it opens out to Miramichi Bay, which eventually becomes the Atlantic Ocean. What was once a shipbuilding hub eventually became home to mills making wood pulp, coated paper, and oriented strandboard. When the mills were all running, the Miramichi River received ice breaker service to move these forest products out to sea. NAFTA had given us Nike sneakers, General Mills cereals, American cable TV (which also showed us American commercials, which stoked our desires for these newly available relishes), but the mills where most of our dads worked were closed or diminished, in some cases eventually disassembled and floated down the river in barges, and so that year and in years to come, there were no ice breakers. The cold snap plus the absence of the breakers meant that the river was frozen completely. Smelt huts were built what would have been too close to the channel in previous years.
But since it was so cold that it didn’t snow much, the entire river, from Nelson to Loggieville, was skate-able. My uncle Danny, fifteen years younger than my dad, took my brother and me out skating after school every day for a week. We could move with infinite freedom. When most of your skating is done in the hockey rink, you learn to turn corners and to stop suddenly, developing “quick twitch” muscles in your legs. But this was a totally different experience, a feeling of unprecedented freedom. One day, it was bright and clear and really windy, and my oversized Boston Bruins Starter pullover (inherited from a cousin playing prep school hockey in Vermont) acted like a sort of patagium and it remains a truer feeling of flight than I’ve had since.2 My brother, uncle, and I skated until we simply couldn’t go any farther. I tend to think of winter as a constraint, and it is, but in this case it also revealed the river in a different way—as a place where you could be faster and freer than anywhere else.
Well, a place where there was markedly less freedom was elementary school. It was frequently so cold that we were kept inside for recess and lunch recess. This has been happening again in Fredericton. My kids and my wife, a teacher, are all complaining about the effects of no outdoor play time on the students and teachers alike. Nowadays, the teachers put French cartoons up on the smart-boards for the kids. I wish they would not do that, but as a university professor, I can hardly begrudge them their lunch break. My sixth grade classroom had an unusual arrangement: we had two male teachers, the principal and vice-principal (Mr. Brown and Mr. Wood) who taught our class together, switching off to undertake their other administrative duties. Mr. Wood, small and spry, funny and ironical—he would eventually be hired by our town’s “Irish Festival” to play a sort of Leprechaun mascot—was the English and Social Studies teacher. Mr. Brown, who wore olive and grey suits and had a beard, and was a Protestant (which we all knew because he added the “For Thine is the Kingdom” part on the “Our Father” at the morning assembly each day) was the Math and Science teacher. I guess I didn’t understand archetypes, in a way, but in retrospect the fun Catholic English teacher and the serious, buttoned-up Protestant Math and Science teacher were an introduction to a typological word that sort of gathered me in, whether I liked it or not.
Our school had recently gotten a computer lab, and Mr. Brown took the occasion offered by the indoor recesses to teach us about computers. We started by learning what a computer, fundamentally, was, how it used little flashes of light to communicate ones and zeros which eventually became the various things we’d see on our screen. How Microsoft Windows ’95, with its incredible GUI (we learned what a GUI was) related to these ones and zeros was opaque to me, and, I suppose, still mostly is. But I remember the fastidiousness with which were taught about the computers. Here is what a disk is—be careful not to move the metal clip, or you may damage the magnetic medium inside and corrupt it (dramatic language), losing your work. We each had one disk to use to store our projects—mine was yellow, which I hated. We were taught best practices for maintaining file architectures, systems for naming our files, how to connect to the internet, sites we were allowed to visit on the internet, how to make file folders for our email, etc. etc. We were also carefully instructed in how to print things—hit file, then select print, now select your printer and make sure not to select the colour printer. It was all so carefully and patiently done, and so seared in my memory, turned into good computing habits that I mostly still use today. Last night, my 12 year old daughter tried to print something out at home, using my computer. My computer was trying to print it off at work, so it didn’t work. My 12 year old had never been shown how to select a printer, which is, whatever else had changed, still a sort of fact of life.
I am, of course, an educator myself now. I teach different students different sorts of things, but I am continually impressed by the extent to which very basic human lessons can’t be provided by osmosis, or expected to be inferred from what is done. I think we are impatient now, more than we used to be, with the sort of forms that would lead us to learn how to use a computer in a very strict, very boring and frustrating way. How much better to jump write in and design something that will then be produced by a 3D printer in your school’s new “maker space.” But in a more basic way, I think our impatience with forms is also a lack of care. It’s boring and difficult to teach children how to select a printer, how to organize their files. But you still need to do it. Freedom can often come from careful adaptation as much as it can from following your impulses, and if you want it for others, you can’t simply force them to be free, you have to create the conditions for them to want it, and to know how to use it when they get it.
Environment Canada weather data for Miramichi seems to be publicly available only since 2002, so I guess we’re stuck with my hazy memory.
I had to look that one up on Wikipedia.
Matt, for the uninitiated: "smelt" in your tender and amusing post is more than an unlovely name; it's a small but sweet tasting fish hungered after by salmon, humans, and other critters.