Making connections online: Kurt Vonnegut and Armistice Day

[Laura Gibbs]

As someone teaching online classes and conducting my entire professional life online, I often find myself having to explain over and over and over again to people that I actually feel MORE connected this way than I ever did sitting in an office, in a building, where I had basically nothing in common with any of the people in that building. Now, teaching online, sitting, virtually, in the little node of the Internet which I occupy, connecting up with other people who teach online, other people who are interested in Latin, and on and on, I get the most intriguing emails from people that affirm the connection we have made thanks to this global net.

Today, for example, I got a very unexpected sort of email - someone who is not one of my students actually read my Class Announcements blog (which I publish as a Blogger.com blog, so as a result it gets indexed super-fast by Google) where I had something in there about Kurt Vonnegut; every day in my announcements blog I include some date-related item, a birthday, a holiday, an anniversary of some kind, and on November 11 I always include an item about Kurt Vonnegut who was born on Armistice Day. Anyway, this fellow - whom I have never met in person and with whom I will probably not exchange emails after our delightful email exchange today - wrote this to me: It was a wonderful coincidence that I came across your Class Announcements this morning. Every November 11 I read aloud the passage in Breakfast of Champions regarding Armistice Day and raise my glass to Kurt Vonnegut in honor of his birthday. Most of my favorite authors are gone now (Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Walker Percy... the list goes on), but their legacies remain intact, at least for me. Thanks for letting me share.. :)

Isn't that nice? I share these items that I care about in the daily announcements on the offhand chance it might also be something my students would appreciate - but thanks to the very public nature of my class announcements blog, it actually found its way outside of my virtual classroom, and made a connection with someone who has nothing to do with the class at all. I think that is GREAT. In my ideal vision of schooling, there would be no classroom walls at all and we would be making connections like this all the time all over the world, sharing and learning.

Here's the Vonnegut item from the class announcements for 11/11:

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Armistice Day - November 11: Kurt Vonnegut. Today, November 11, is celebrated in the United States as Veterans Day, although it was originally known as Armistice Day, "Day of the Setting-Down-of-Arms (Weapons)," to mark the end of hostilities on the Western Front of World War I on November 11 in 1918. November 11 is also the birthday of one of the greatest American writers of the 20th-century, Kurt Vonnegut. You can read about Vonnegut's life and career in this Wikipedia article. Vonnegut was the author of many novels and short stories, including Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) - it is the last one, Breakfast of Champions, which is my own personal favorite. Here is a quote from that novel where Vonnegut talks about the fact that he was born on Armistice Day in 1922, just a few years after the end of World War I: "When I was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind." Sadly, Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007... but left behind many wonderful stories for us to remember him by!