Life's like a movie, write your own ending

  

You know how in school they teach you how to write a certain way with certain rules to follow and with a formal structure with citations done exactly the right way? When I was young, I hated that so much that I'd go as far to say English was my least favorite subject. I hated the amount of work I had to do when all I wanted to do was start a sentence with the word "But" and I was told that was improper grammar. So much of my current writing style exists in spite of that. 

A lot of teachers and proofreaders for my writing have described it as "stream of consciousness" and they'd be right. Simple as. But I like that, it feels like when people read my writing that we're actually having a conversation. Contractions, kindas, and phrases like "I s'pose" fill my page. When I write to people, I write to appeal to them like I'm their little league baseball coach, getting down on one knee after a crushing loss, putting my hand on their shoulder and saying, "Hey Champ." Getting more down to Earth makes me feel like I can get on you as the reader's level way easier. Maybe that's because of my love for comics and manga, it's much more down to Earth, Spider-Man thwips around New York effectively talking to the reader when he says, "I gotta find Electro before he causes any more damage to the city! But first, I should check in with MJ." 

I do this because I want my future students to know they can write about whatever they want, they have full creative freedom when it comes to writing, because writing is the most freeing art form. Everyone writes every single day, the thoughts in your head are your own writing, the structure of the sentence you're saying is your own writing, it's all up to you, you can write about anything you want and there will always be an audience for it. And I, as the teacher, will be your number one fan and happy to be seated in your audience. 

Lurking

I've never understood comments on Youtube videos.

Not that commenting on videos is a bad thing, I just don't understand the signal from brain to fingers that results in "12:44 comparing breaking bad to wow wow wubbzy is CRAZY" because I do not feel the need to share my reaction to that information. Alternatively, you can go on Twitter right now and find a popular post that you won't find any real interaction with, you'll just find 100 checkmark accounts that all are bots saying some variation of "this is so cool I already touched myself to this post" or some real guy asking grok to explain everything for him because he's unable to form any critical thought by himself, so your response will be BURIED under all those replies that don't do anything and don't give you anything and so EVEN IF you were to reply no one would ever see it because you don't have that stupid blue check so there's no reason to respond to anything.

This is a recording I took of just a typical reply thread on Twitter. It's stupid, it's nothing, and it's dead. 

...the internet has made me very cynical.

Thus, I don't really interact with the internet as anything more than a viewer, that's all. I don't really post, I don't comment, I don't do much of my own thing. However, what everyone who knows me will tell you is that I share SO much of what I see with everyone in my circle. Stupid posts that don't mean anything they just made me laugh, something that made me irrationally annoyed, cool edits of things I like, songs I think the person would like, articles to my dad about why our president is failing, everything like that. I don't interact with anything directly, I'm a lurker, an observer, someone who will distribute, but not contribute. All of my internet interaction skills come from using my better judgement (wink wink nudge nudge) on if a source is reliable and trustworthy. There's a great deal of importance in just understanding where something on the internet came from and if it has any credit to it, and I like to think I've been put through the ringer enough times to make that call. Especially now in the age of information, there's so much misinformation being spread. AI runs rampant, dead internet theory is probably true (see Twitter post above) and lying is legal, free, and gets a lot of clicks. 

Maybe being cynical and distrusting on the internet is a good thing for now, because it keeps you safe. However, it's kinda like the second half of that Animaniacs quote, "Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy but socially dead." However however...what do I know, I'm just some guy that you can choose to listen to or not. There's a good number of ways to discern whether or not a source is trustworthy, but when it comes to social media, it's in your hands what you want to look at and what you don't. Sometimes you see a video called "Can a shotgun shell EXPLODE 100 gallons of MILK????" and you can't help yourself you do want to know if a shotgun shell can EXPLODE 100 gallons of MILK and so you click on it. Then in the recommended videos there's another video of a guy who is gonna see how far a sniper bullet can shoot through ice and well you've just GOTTA click on that one. Oh, cool, there's a video explaining how guns work? Might as well. And so you keep clicking, and clicking, and clicking, and soon enough you're so far down an alt-right pipeline that you're clicking add to cart on a "Don't tread on me" flag that's gonna be in the background of your 8:00 AM Zoom math class. 

Internet safety is doing...not that. It's having the self-control to stop yourself from clicking on something you don't actually want to see, stopping yourself from doom scrolling for hours upon hours. You don't have to waste your time. 

Although, the pipeline of clicking does bring up a good point. Negotiation, the process of travelling across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms (wink wink nudge nudge) is another great skill to have when surfing the world wide web. The internet is great for giving you millions of perspectives on everything, you can have, as Bo Burnham once said, a little bit of everything all of the time. Gathering the full picture and the whole idea is why Youtube comment sections exist, it's why there are entire classes on how to research effectively on the internet, it's why bots will touch themselves to every popular post on Twitter because so many people are looking at that comment. Sometimes you want to see what people have to say about the new live-action adaptation Disney just announced. Only when you start to explore those diverse perspectives can you build a strong viewpoint on a topic. And that's when you can bring your own perspective into your classroom. 

That's right, all along this was a big introduction to me as the prospective English teacher. Aren't I smooth?

All of the above text can also be applied as a teacher. I think it's incredibly important to teach students how to find a credible source and how to get as many perspectives as possible on a topic, and it's even more important to teach them internet safety. There's value to be found in a little bit of everything all the time, they can learn as much as they want about something and get help from an online source when I didn't explain something as well as I should have. Plus, texting has made communication across the world super simple. However, that cynicism I have is not unfounded, because there are so many different ways today's youth can be exposed to danger on the internet. Those are very dark sides of the internet that are becoming easier for children to not only access but be lured into. Some even say children are growing up too fast being shown everything on the internet whenever they want. There are forums upon forums for kids to stumble onto and the dominos start falling for them to ruin their lives. 

A wise man once said, "The love of my life is a lady named Ramblin' On" and I think I'd agree with him, which is a long winded and annoying way for me to say it's time to wrap this up. I'm very nervous for future generations and how they explore the internet, maybe stricter guidelines will be put in place and I won't have to worry, or maybe they won't and the chaos will sort itself out, who knows. I just know the internet is massive, everyone needs to look out for each other, and Youtube comments make no sense to me.