In-Person Education: The Importance of Discomfort

Here’s the problem, teaching requires the creation of community and that is nearly impossible to do with technology. Yes, there are Facebook groups and support groups and recovery groups who have formed bonds but here’s the thing, students need community, they need guidance AND they need to learn something new, challenging and often without an immediate reward. These three elements are how most teachers construct their teaching framework with an unconscious instinct to protect, mentor and model ethical behavior. There have been many descriptions of how the brain works to accept knowledge, find connections with previous ideas or understandings, and then add this new information to, hopefully, be applied to both the present and the future and even to the past.

The classroom, the college campus are families, villages, cooperatives and communes. The role of the leader is to inspire, teach and then step aside to allow the students to find their own ideas, information and life lessons like, es, it’s hard to share a small room with someone you don’t particularly like. Or yes, you won’t die from loneliness, but you might need to experience discomfort getting along with people unlike yourself. And yes, your family and former friends can’t supply the only intimacy and conflict you experience. This is how online school — high school, college — is destined to miss the important albeit ephemeral transformation from child to adult, a process that requires human interaction and separation from your comfort.

My freshman year I shared an apartment with someone so unlike myself I studied her as if she was an anthropological subject. She moved in with 20 frozen steak dinners since she could not cook at all. She called her parents daily. She got up an hour early to wash, blow-dry and arrange her hair, put on make up and find perfect accessories for the outfit chosen the previous night. She was going to marry a Jewish doctor. I, on the other hand was someone raised by parents who loved us but neglected their three daughters completely. I was a stranger to make-up unless it was war paint, I went to class with hair styled by my pillow, dressed in clothes that appeared in my closet. I was an excellent cook and never called my parents. I chose boyfriends on the basis of how objectionable my parents would find them.

Up until this moment I had been in a bubble of liberalism, feminism, intellectual intensity and a sense of myself as better than most people. While some of these traits were helpful my narrow-mindedness, my elitism, my anger, were not conducive to getting along with anyone outside of my subset of acceptable friends. I taught her how to cook when the steaks ran out and she was dating an Italian Catholic. She taught me how apply lipstick and listen to people I might disagree with. My teachers in high school and college taught me how to interpret knowledge, pay attention to important details, how to learn from someone you don’t like. How to judge less and accept more.

This was a microcosm of the world I entered upon graduation, a world of individuals who found my ideas ridiculous and had strong feelings about my hair. I worked in jobs where I encountered misogyny, racist beliefs and open hostility. High School had prepared me for this, and college gave me an advanced degree in team building, toleration (I hated the Grateful Dead) and resilience. Also, college at least was inspiring, intense and life changing. Of course, online classes are necessary during this pandemic and will always have a place in teaching. But we cannot replicate the multi-faceted effect of joining with other humans to be enlightened.

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach