Samuel Scoville: Laptop Dancing

Monday, November 26, 2012

Laptop Dancing

Bring Your Own Device: Preparing for the Influx of Mobile Computing Devices in Schools

WIFI in Jensen. A difference that

makes a DIFFERENCE

I was pour out my anecdotes & elaborating

this idea and that idea regarding necessary

but insufficient causality: my students all

locked into to their own mobile devices,
now wifi-connected to the internet & google
world but none chewing gum thank god or
wiggling in their seats.

Mind at Work: eyes fixed to their individual

screens as opposed to eyes that used to drift

toward the door every time someone walked

by or the hallway vacuum gets started up.
Concerted concentration minding their own
business.

Nevertheless and in spite of itI was telling
them the story of my grandfather’s invasion
by a thief in the night—an exchane of fire
power and a bullet lodging in his arm-pit
without which bullet none of us would be here
together right now.

Look it up, I said:

SAMUEL SCOVILLE WOUNDED BY A BURGLAR:

NYTimes, April 24, 1897.

Yep, I got it—a student reports almost instantly.

“Saved by the Bed Clothing!”

Laptop dancing.

If it hadn’t been for that bad-boy burglar, I tell

them again, none of us would be-here-now today.

A necessary but insufficient because-ality.

Wanna bet? Shall I spell IT out for you? I
promise you.

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Auto Bio

I choose, as a determining POINT in my life, to acknowledge a bullet fired into the armpit of my grandfather, Samuel Scoville, Jr. by a thief in the night sometime in the late 19^thc.

The thief escaped, my grandfather having pulled his own pistol from beneath the pillow, squeezing off a couple of rounds and sending the burglar scurrying into the Connecticut night...

For reasons of family notoriety, the incident was reported in both New York and Philadelphia papers. A former roommate in Philly called up Young Goodman Sam, inviting him down for a weekend gala: The Yale-Penn Football game. “You can take my sister Katherine, and chaperone me and my fiancé, he said.

In those days couples were not advised to be alone. Unaccompanied.

Sam took a steam-driven locomotive train down to Philadelphia, escorted Katherine to the leather-helmet contest, fell in love, asked her to marry him. She did & they lived more or less HAP-ily ever after, generating a tribe of offspring who like wise generated in kind so that if it hadn’t of been for that bullet, well, it’s impossible to begin to consider how unimaginably different life-as-we-know-it would have been. No one can say.

For one thing: YOU, dear Reader, wouldn’t be reading THIS HERE right now, resurrecting these words to walk around in your skull-haus this very be-here-now moment. So even you are impacted forever by that bullet.

(I could drive up to Connecticut right now, retrieve the small bite of lead, drop it in your hand and remind you how co-incidental our life is—how inexplicable, how arbitrary & selective our accounts, how much we omit which is also absolutely necessary, how inadequate our because & affects.)

The bullet is a NECESSARY but INSUFFICIENT cause of who-I-am, without which any explanation would be incomplete. Sam Scoville

Samuel Scoville