(Great column by Muhammad Hanif, a novelist turned teacher. f.sheikh)
“Let’s read,” I told the students in my writing class, trying to invoke the authority of my own high-school literature teacher. I was hoping they would unzip their backpacks, pull out the books and start reading. I had become a visiting teacher at a university in Karachi, Pakistan, a couple of years before the pandemic, and I was struggling. It felt nice to be called a professor, but I was reluctant to call my students, “my students.”
After a lifetime in journalism and of writing books, teaching seemed like a proper grown-up job. If you get something wrong in a newspaper article, you try to do better the next time. When your novel’s plot goes wonky, you can try a different approach — or repeat the same mistakes and give them another title.
But when I started teaching, I realized that I wasn’t likely to get a second chance with the mind of a 20-year-old.
I tried to make up for my inexperience with gray-haired authority. I wanted students to read what I loved, but I wasn’t quite ready for how they read it.
That day two years ago, instead of opening their bags, they pulled out their phones, as if they had just received an important message or needed to call someone to tell them about the confused man in their class. Noticing the panic on my face, one student pointed out that they were doing their reading on their phone.
It took me a few more classes to accept the fact that they had our whole damn syllabus on their phones and were actually reading, not watching TikTok videos.