While the activity was underway, one student hijacked this sophisticated distributed projection system, casting antisemitic images around the room on each monitor, following me, taunting me, Each of these monitors is outfitted with Solstice (Mersive, 2017), which allows students to connect with the monitor with their smartphone and project images-such as photos of their drawings-so that they can discuss them as a group. My classroom is designated an "Active Learning" classroom and includes features such as eight monitors placed around the room, one large monitor each at the front and the back of the room and then a smaller monitor at each of the student table pods. That activity marked the transition from a typical day to a terrible day. We started the routine activity that I use to get a sense of students' experiences, background knowledge, and dispositions: asking them to draw a picture of what it looks like to teach with technology. We discussed the nature of the class and its expectations. So, on this first day, we engaged in an icebreaker to learn each other's names.
As such, I work hard to be both enthusiastic and rigorous in my approach to not only help students overcome any fears or discomfort they may have around the purposeful use of technology, but to also help them connect the use of technology with the explicit urban-and social justice-oriented mission that our school of education has embraced. Early in their academic careers, and early on their path to becoming teachers, this class is where these students are introduced to the idea of using technology within their teaching practice. It Could Have Been Any Other First Day of the Semester: The Antisemitic Event The first day of my undergraduate course for future K12 educators, Teaching with Technology, began like most other first days. As the strategic use of technology and hateful jokes and memes by the alt-right become more pervasive and normalized, however, this account highlights some of the challenges and opportunities in responding to the technology-infused social and political landscapes that have infiltrated university campuses within the context of rising American antisemitism, xenophobia, and racism (ADL, 2018a). I didn't always do the right thing, and I stumbled many times in this rehumanization effort. I provide insight into working with the university bureaucracy and with my students to rehumanize our relationships. The event and its fallout are placed within larger sociopolitical, sociotechnological and socioemotional contexts. This chapter provides an account of my experiences as an Ashkenazi Jewish male professor encountering and confronting antisemitism on the first day of the semester, and the ensuing disruption of the classroom social landscapes. The same could be said about lifelong learning in general, and reacting to extraordinary circumstances-such as being subject to explicitly harmful antisemitic images and memes in the classroom-in particular. According to the Talmud, Rabba bar Rav Huna humbly taught, "A person does not understand statements of Torah unless he stumbles in them" (Sefaria, 2018).
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