About the Tumblr that Sort of Was, Sort of Wasn’t … and the Students Who Are(n’t) in College Courses

In the era of Covid, one of the things we all learned almost immediately was that things were Different Now. Old rules didn’t apply. Some new ones did — unless you didn’t want them to, or didn’t believe they were real, or if the CDC hadn’t verified them yet because of undisclosed “reasons” — a very handy expression I learned from Tumblr.

One of the first casualties of the split between “before” and “after” was the concept of “normal,” because suddenly “normal” could only be referred to in one of two ways, each of them so entrenched it seemed as if they had dug into foxholes somehow in the gap between Friday, March 13th, and Monday, March 16th: “back to normal” (aspirational; vanishingly unlikely) and “the new normal” (weirdly upbeat; a way of reminding ourselves and each other that, really, everything was still fine even though our loved ones were dying and our livelihoods were imploding).

One of the other casualties was the divide between “work” and “not-work.” If you are working from home, and you never leave home (except when you do, as all too many people did, clamoring about quarantine and how much they missed going out for a quick run to the store or a casual bite to eat even as they took illicit pleasure in a slow stroll down the cookies-and-crackers aisle or shifted gamely from one foot to the other, standing too close in line waiting to pay for their takeout), then the burden of proving your productivity while you work from home so that you can avoid being either called back into the dangerous fumes of the anti-maskers who crowd your designated workplace or finding yourself declared useless, an unnecessary expenditure, a luxury your employer can give up in these troubled times pervades your intimate and interior space, haunting the living room and the hallway and the guestroom half-bath like some sort of miasmic taint itself. You never really go to work, but you also never really leave.

This casualty applied to school as well, which isn’t surprising when you consider that school is the work of minors in our society: the process of producing themselves as scrupulously optimized labor.

The internet has been essential to this process — almost as essential as it has been to the process and practice of entertainment, from which it is increasingly not-distinguished.

And yet access to the internet — the ability to effective integrate all these necessary intrusions and furtive escapes––is not at all equally distributed; nor is the internet we all access the same.

I got a reminder of this truth on Monday, when one of the students in an all-digital EN 111 (Freshman Composition I) course I’m teaching for early college scholars at a local high school let slip to me that she and several of her classmates had been unable to access the content I’d been posting to the course Tumblr page, because Tumblr was blocked on their school-issued Chromebooks.

Now, why it never occurred to any of the students involved, or indeed even to their guidance counselor, who had been working with the school’s IT department to try and get Tumblr unblocked for that course, to simply tell me this was an issue — that’s its own knotty problem, speaking volumes of the conditions of secondary education for highly motivated students in U.S. public schools and the level of help they expect to get, or not get, from their instructors.

Guys — the course Tumblr is not for me; it serves literally no function if you cannot access it.

I’m still in the process of finding an alternate platform and easy (or at least easy-ish) way to host content for them in a format that is a little less clunky than the Canvas LMS my university has been using for the past several years — Canvas handles many functions very well, but presenting integrated multimedia content in a way that is either readily accessible or visually appealing is not one of them.

Issues with access go far beyond what a local school board thinks should be available to high school students enrolled in a college course — although, for the record, if you are going to enroll the kids in college, then you should expect and support their need to access everything that would be a part of the ordinary college curriculum as it is typically taught by that instructor, whoever they happen to be.

In my case and in my course, that’s usually a Tumblr page — and while I don’t have any issue with building a website for my students (realistically, it doesn’t present a significant level of difficulty over maintaining a Tumblr page for them), it’s absurd that the high school Powers That Be want these students to get college credit and do college-level work, yet they are unwilling to grant these same students the autonomy of access that would enable them to navigate the digital texts on which the course material is hosted … much less the kinds of access that will be necessary to delve into all of the thorny intellectual problems that form the labyrinths we all navigate online.

Today’s projects include: Figuring out a way to make talking-through-the-problem a productive part of discussion as we head into their first essay cycle.