Compare a few significant social interactions in your life–especially if some of them are mediated by writing…especially writing on a screen.

I’ve always preferred writing to talking as a method of communication. I find that when we write, we’re more likely to actually transmit information than when we speak to each other. And as much as I enjoy chatting with friends for hours, when it comes to the less inane, it seems to me like a waste of time and energy to fumble around a topic instead of getting to the point. I’m often annoyed when an old classmate will call me and try to make “small talk,” when all she really wants is my help, and we’ve rarely spoken beyond that. Why is there a need beyond the original greeting to act as if she’s interested in what I’m doing? I know that she wants something, she knows that I know, and once we’ve covered the fact that we’re both doing well, there’s no need to inquire further. Of course, this isn’t always so, but it’s usually clear when a person is genuinely interested. I might come off as a bit jaded, but I’ve honestly no patience for it.

On the other hand, there are real friends, people who want to speak to me and to whom I want to speak, and those people I make a point of calling from time to time, or (preferably) seeing them in person. In those cases, inane conversation is really an important aspect of the friendship, and really very enjoyable. We’ll email and text message, too, of course, but generally, these relationships are in person.

I bring the latter forward now because I’d like to compare it to my online interactions with absolute strangers I have never met, and probably will never meet. (And no, I’m not talking about following the Dalai Lama on Twitter.) I’ve met these people through my online interests, generally on a fandom-related site, and they know me only by my handle.

My online relationships are fairly one-dimensional. While my friends in the real world know about my family, other friends, interests, goals, and everything in between, my online friends know about one particular interest of mine. Granted, they know far more about it than my real world friends would ever even care to learn, but they don’t know me, just that one aspect of my identity.

But my online interactions aren’t about getting to know other people. They’re about learning and communicating and delving deeply into whichever shared interest we have. Sometimes, they do dip into the real world- for example, one of the contributors on one forum once asked for help on a newspaper article she was writing on a certain topic, one my sister knows much about firsthand. I was able to connect them via email, and two completely unrelated people on different continents shared information. However, as a rule, I don’t ask for information unless if it’s offered. We’re united only by our love for a fandom, and that’s more than enough for a relationship so limited.

This topic doesn’t mention learning, but I’d like to address it, too, since it’s applicable here. I feel that when I’m speaking to friends in the fandom, I’m much more likely to be open to new information than when it’s taught to me by a real world friend. I think that I associate the Internet and my online friends with fun and enjoyment, and one of my favorite things to do online is to read essays written by online friends. For example, I took a class on mythology last year in college, and found that a topic that had greatly interested me before the class became far duller when taught in a school setting. But a few weeks ago, one of my fellow posters on one site took The Odyssey and The Iliad and compared them to the storyline for several seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (here, if anyone’s interested). And that I was much more interested in reading; and, in fact, for the first time since taking the mythology class, I took out my copy of The Odyssey to reread it. There’s a certain, more casual attitude in writing when it’s over the Internet (case in point: this would be far more formal if I weren’t writing it for an online course), and because of that, there’s far more openness to learning and teaching. It doesn’t matter that I’m still in college and half of my friends of livejournal are forty-year-old professionals; they read what I write and treat it with respect, like they would any of their peers’ work. On the Internet, a screen conceals us all and forces us to treat others as equals unless our online behavior makes that impossible. Without race, gender, age, or other external factors influencing our opinions, we really can teach and learn from each other with no reservations.

As we’re talking about school and cultures (or just school, or just culture), let’s not forget that neither school nor culture is an anonymous, impersonal force.  Culture and school are both made up of people.  And people, in all settings, interact with other people.  Schools, we’ve seen and discussed, may have official characters, defined rules and policies (even mission statements), but they also have unofficial, personal, socially-defined characters.

And a big part of that is connections among and between people.  In some of our readings for unit 1 (I’m thinking particularly of the chapter from Tom Sawyer), and in some of your reflections and forum posts, a theme I kept seeing was how friendships, or sometimes the lack thereof, are a defining feature of students’ experience of school.  Many of you talked of the social dimensions of your own educational histories, and your own educational presents.  Making friends, making enemies, being bullied, being a bully, falling in love, breaking up, gossip, team work and competition–all of these are more a part of the experience of school than anything that comes out of a textbook.  We’ll see this again in the readings for this unit.

In fact, it might be the fights and the friendships, the friends and the enemies (or frenemies) which we remember the most about school.  And isn’t this true about culture, too?  If we’re talking about each of us having (being embedded in, and having embedded within us) multiple cultures, we should also be talking about the groups (of people) which form those cultures.  And it’s not all cooperation and teamwork, either.  Many times what goes on in school is about competing or struggling with another group or another people, defining oneself and one’s culture in opposition to others.  That’s part of what I mean with “frenemies.”  Fighting with someone, for young people and even older people, is sometimes a way of showing affection, or it can become affection, or it can cement affections with others.

And there’s learning there, too (which is why we remember it).  When my daughter started kindergarten, years ago, her teacher told me that the main goal of kindergarten was not teaching kids to count or to read or to know their colors and shapes.  It was teaching them to interact with each other, not to grab, not to hit, how to sit still and stand in line.  And that’s just the teacher’s idea of the social learning that has to take place in that early year.  What went on at recess, what goes on in college dorms or chatrooms or hallways or bars or Starbuck’s–that might be where some very important education (and building of culture) really happens.

As we move to the future of education, as we start opening our classrooms to the wider (online?) world, we also will see new ways for the social, interpersonal part of schooling to work.  I think that humans are endlessly adaptable in getting what they need and finding new ways to create their social spheres.  We’ve talked about how the medium of writing, or the barrier of a computer screen, may interfere with human interaction.  But I think humans need that interaction, and we find a way to get it, even if it takes a different shape.  After all, even our discussion about the ways that writing or computers can interfere with human contact took place in writing on computers! And I think those were some fairly rich discussions, and I think there’s a type of human contact–even developing friendships–happening in this class.

Or if not in this class, at least other places online.  Online friends? Online enemies? Online frenemies?  Just as in “traditional” classroom, there is a “back-channel,” an unofficial culture, and we make it (or you do) among and between and against each other, and we learn from that, too.  So what shapes will school friendships take in the future of education?  What do you think?

Like Sharon and Jacquie, I’ve also grown up in an Orthodox Jewish family. My mother was raised Modern Orthodox, and my father with no religion at all, and both eventually turned to the Orthodox Jewish lifestyle instead. Because of that, I was raised in an environment where I was always comfortable asking any sort of questions and with a tolerance for irreverence, and I was therefore sent to schools with the same ideals.

The school where I spent third grade through twelfth grade was the one large ultra-religious, all-girls school in my neighborhood, so they had no choice but to accept all kinds of students. I don’t know how much any of you know about Orthodox Jewry, but there are many divided sects that come into conflict elsewhere, and they all came together in my school. There was no real judgment there, not when we’d all grown up together. We had a strict uniform in school, but no one really minded when we were younger, and by the time high school came around, we’d all found ways to express ourselves through accessories and makeup (which was against the rules, but that stopped no one). I never really cared much, and it actually took me a long time to adjust to being in schools where I had to have a new outfit every day.

In elementary school, we had a double curriculum, in which we learned Jewish subjects (we called them “Hebrew classes”) and normal, secular subjects. In the mornings, we studied things like the Hebrew language, Bible classes, and Jewish laws. After lunch, we covered math, science, grammar, history, and all the other standard subjects. I developed a healthy love for all of it, whether Hebrew or English.

In junior high, things changed quite a bit. While before then, we’d only had two teachers- one for Hebrew classes, one for English- now, we were departmentalized with different teachers for different subjects. While before then, the teachers were viewed as distant authorities, no matter how “nice” they were, now we were encouraged to build relationships with our teachers. We joked around with them in class as we reached our teenage years; I guess that it was because we had decided that we were old enough now to carry on mature conversation with our teachers. Classes went more in depth and questions and philosophical discussion were as common as simple text-based lectures. We also put together many presentations and activities based on what we’d learned.

High school took this a step further. Most of my teachers were respected members of the community, and many took on a “mentor” role for students. There was a potpourri of teaching styles, as is common in any school, but we were generally encouraged to ask questions and we were given satisfactory answers. One thing my school did lack, though, was many options for English classes. We took the requirements and there were few classes beyond those, not including Advanced Placement courses. We were encouraged to go to college, but they wanted us to get through it as quickly as possible, so only non-Regents courses through which we could get college credit were offered. (I understand that the new principal has changed that, though, and there are now many other courses offered, but that was after my time.) I was fortunate- the principals encouraged me to skip several English classes and take all my twelfth grade courses a year early, so by the time that I was a senior, I was able to take only Advanced Placement courses, and permitted to take several extra ones on my own.

After high school, I spent a year abroad in Israel, in a Hebrew studies program that really emphasized introspection and individuality above academics, even though we did have a six-day week with more class time than ever before. That year really was about understanding myself and where I wanted to go with my life, and I probably learned more then than I did during any other school year.

Now, I’ve been in Brooklyn College for almost two years, and I’ve really enjoyed it. I love the variety of classes in particular- I’ve been able to take classes on everything from Japanese to counseling to Harry Potter! I do miss the Hebrew subjects, though, and I’ve encouraged my family to engage in absurd Bible trivia games at the Sabbath table so I can still enjoy them.

Interestingly, I think my enjoyment of certain subjects faded once I took them in school and turned fun into work. Now that I no longer study physics, the Bible, philosophy, or even math, I love discussing them and reading books about them during my downtime. Although there are some classes that have increased my interest in subjects (for example, I didn’t like philosophy or Harry Potter until I took class on them), I’m generally happiest when I’m learning on my own, via the internet or even a debate with my brother. And when I’m happy, I learn best.

Warning: This is incredibly long. It was unintentional, I just kept typing! I’m really not as interesting as the giant mass of text would suggest.

I was also raised in an Orthodox Jewish background, so for the first paragraph of Sharon’s reflection, we’re very similar.

I was raised in Teaneck, New Jersey, in a big Jewish community. I went to a local yeshivah (Jewish Orthodox school) from kindergarten to 5^th grade, when I switched to a different school in Riverdale, New York. (S/A/R, for anyone who cares.)

I feel my school did a pretty good job balancing out my Judaic studes classes (Hebrew, Prophets, Bible, Talmud, etc.) with my classic secular subjects of History, English, Science, Math, and so on. I enjoyed it so much, that when they opened up a new high school, I signed up for the first graduating class of S/A/R High School.

Being in the first class was really interesting. We started with only 68 students and all of the teachers were new. Some teachers were good, some never lasted beyond that first year. We became very tight-knit, bonding over the experience of being the “guinea pigs” of our administration. My day was from 8 to 5:10 every day, but I stayed most days for some extracurricular activity, which was a big part of my high school experience. I stayed drama, choir, newspaper, literary journal and floor hockey (ice hockey rules, played on a gym floor), which was my favorite sport ever, but doesn’t exist outside of our tiny league. I still miss it all the time. It was the first time I was really personally invested in a sport.

I actually found my administration very open about questions concerning our Judaism and identity, and the school tried very hard to balance both curriculums. I loved English especially, and was thinking about being an English major in college. While math was never my strongest subject, I had one teacher who was just so passionate about it that to this day I can never really hate math. I just feel incredibly frustrated when I don’t understand it.

Besides the double-curriculum, there was a twice-weekly class that was mandatory, but ungraded. We would divide into small groups (3-8 people) and learn some Judaic text that wasn’t in our regular curriculum. The point of this class was to learn Torah L’Shamawhich we roughly translated as “learning for the sake of learning,” not learning for a grade or a requirement. It’s an idea I’ve taken with me into my college years, and I audited a class last semester for fun, and I try to keep learning things (such as Japanese) on my own time, outside of the traditional classroom setting. I also try to take at least one class every semester for fun, as a rule.

I applied to the Honors College at Queens without really investigating what an opportunity it was, assuming that I wouldn’t get in. I actually applied to nine different colleges, and for a while Barnard College was my top choice. But I was wait-listed, and I found out that quite a few people from my grade were going to Barnard, and I wanted to go to college with a fresh slate and break out of my shell a little bit. So when the Honors College got back to me, I went to all of the events and chose to come here.

Then I decided, like many of my classmates, to take a year off and go to Israel to study in a religious school for a year. I chose a school in Jerusalem that was known for serious students and a lot of freedom, because I wanted a serious classroom environment but a fun atmosphere. That year was an amazing experience. Virtually all of the classes were “learning for the sake of learning,” in that none of these classes were really graded. We woke up and went to classes because we wanted to. The schedule was from 8:30 in the morning until 10 at night, with some breaks in the day for lunch and dinner and hanging out. I took classes in Talmud, Prophets, Bible, Halakhah (rules for things like Kosher) and other stuff like that. Being entirely self-motivated was incredibly hard, and there were days I wasn’t anywhere near 100%. We had trips to go hiking around the country with our teachers, and we went to teacher’s houses for Sabbath and other holidays. It was amazing to bond with teachers and other students on so many levels outside of the classroom.

It was my first time living away from home, which meant there was no one to tell me to get out of my bed unless I did it. I learned a lot about myself that year.

My best learning though, would have to be on the public transportation. Israel is a teeny little country, about the size of New Jersey, but it has a fantastic bus system. Unfortunately, my Hebrew wasn’t really up to par, especially at the beginning of the year. Learning how to use Hebrew to get around was a learning experience unto itself. People were incredibly helpful, and I learned all the ways to check with a bus driver to make sure he didn’t forget to remind me for my stop. (“Where is _____ stop?” “How many more minutes?” “How many more stops?” “Are we close?” “Is it next?”) My best experience was visiting my cousins in a little farming community a few miles from Sderot. The bus dropped me off by the side of the road and there was NOTHING in sight as far as the eye could see but my little bus stop. It was the perfect beginning to a horror movie. But I made it through that time, and all the other times I had to take buses to get places. I also figured out how to handle cabs when I needed them. During that year I went to a friends wedding, a cousin’s shiva house, up and down Israel for weekend visits to family and strangers, a week in Poland to learn about the Holocaust, 12 days in Europe over Spring break, you name it. I learned how to plan ahead, and how to handle myself in all sorts of crazy situations.

I found that living at school also taught me a lot about how to handle people and conflicts. My roommate was amazing from day one, but I had two suite-mates that I didn’t get along with at all. It took four months before I was able to switch rooms, but I learned a lot of skills I use with difficult people.

After that, my first year at Queens College was a big adjustment for me. I don’t know about Hunter, but at Queens, it feels like 99% of the students are in pure commuter-mode: show up to class, take class, leave campus. There was very little interaction between students before and after class, and the dorms weren’t built yet. I got an apartment with a friend and a girl I met through a posting on a mailing list. I had to handle food planning for the first time, and Macaulay was actually a lot less supportive then I was expecting. However the required Macaulay classes were one of the best things about my first semester. Not, mind you, because of the content, although seeing a bunch of plays in the city was amazing. But it was the only time I was in a class where I saw the same people multiple times a day. And we hung out in the lounge together, and spoke to each other, and now I know everyone’s name, and we hang out at seminars together. But those first few weeks were incredibly lonely.

But I got used to being in an apartment instead of a dorm, so when the dorm opened I chose to stay off-campus. I enjoy hosting meals and small movie-watching parties. I am the one who tries to arrange meals for the whole apartment on a nightly basis, and I try to keep up a cleaning schedule, although that’s my major weakness. I’ve learned that I tend to work better at the library than hanging out with my roommates at home, so I just stay on campus for some of my work.

I’ve also found at college that they are finally doing what my high school was always trying to do – most classes seem to overlap each other, the same information applying to different subjects. I’m always delighted when I sit in on a class and learn something that I’ve learned already in another field or subject. Sometimes I finally feel like college is getting me out into the world to learn what real life is really like. Sometimes I feel like I’m still in high school, though, where grades feel frustratingly useless and nothing I learn seems at all useful. I suppose only time will tell at this point.