The Mary Washington Way
When University of Mary Washington President Troy Paino found out students had once again erected tents in Jefferson Square to protest the war in Gaza, he decided to make his way to the grassy square rather than call in Virginia State Police. It was a drizzly Saturday afternoon, April 27, and a dozen 20-somethings were sitting inside the tents, eating snacks and studying for exams. Campus police were already there monitoring the situation as they had been since the sit-in started the day before. The students weren’t being disruptive or violent in any way, Paino said later. “By all accounts, they were peaceful and not engaging in any form of antisemitic rhetoric.”
Clear and Present
Shortly into my first year teaching English and International Baccalaureate Lang & Lit at Mountain View High School in Stafford County, Virginia—the first day, actually—I knew I was going to have to do something about the cellphones. If a school shooter had blasted his way through the door to our classroom, the kids might have videoed first, posted on social media second, and only then looked around for somewhere to hide. And that’s IF they’d been able to pull their faces away from whatever was streaming on their iPhone screens to even notice. Not that I allowed them to be on their phones. They were just that good at sneaking them out, and that uncaring about my disapprobation and orders for them to put the damn things away already so we could get back to discussing the implications of the curious elliptical passage at the end of chapter two in The Great Gatsby. (A drunk Nick Carraway, the narrator, is standing in the bedroom of the photographer Mr. McKee, who is sitting on the bed in his underwear.)
Expanding Minds, Forging Connections, Sweetening Lives
Write to Steve Watkins at [email protected]. If you’re interested in submitting something for publication, best to run your ideas by me first. You can do that by emailing me at [email protected].
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