TECHNOLOGY DANCE Session #16

Technology Dance #16

Rockin Around the Christmas Tree

by Kenneth H Westgate Jr 12/19/2024 ©

Snow had been falling in Scranton the day before. The weather was cold and blustery as I drove northward from Allentown on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Christmas break for my second year in graduate school had started two weeks before. It was New Year’s Eve and I was on my way to a New Year’s Eve party with fellow classmates from my Rehabilitation Counseling program at the University of Scranton. As I drove northward my mind wandered to thoughts of my internship that had already started at Good Shepherd Home in Allentown, and to the daunting task ahead of finishing my graduate research and my thesis before the end of May 1972. I tried not to focus on that and just embrace the beauty of the fallen snow on the woodlands as I drove North through the Pocono Mountains. I was headed to the rented home of my friend Mark Santucci and his fiance. I would be a member of Mark’s wedding party during our summer break a few short weeks after graduation in June of 1972, but for now I was just going to celebrate New Year’s Eve with members of our two graduate Rehabilitation Counseling classes. Mark was in the class behind me so there would be members of both classes at this party.

It was after dark when I arrived at the house. There wasn’t a whole lot of parking in his neighborhood so I had to park a few blocks away and walk to his house. Wrapped up as tightly as I could to protect against the sting of the very cold night air, I made my way to the house. Almost before I could knock, the door opened and Mark greeted me with one of his welcoming Italian hugs. Someone had seen me coming up the street from the front window and they thought I looked a bit frozen so they told Mark and he headed for the door to let me in quickly. The dance had already started. Music was blasting and party goers were already hitting the buffet and the drinks tables. After I arrived several other students drifted in over the course of the next half hour. Many of the students lived locally but some, like me, lived further away. While some of the married students and a few of the single students had rented apartments or houses in the Scranton area a few others were actually residents of the Scranton area as well. I had chosen to live in the graduate dorm. I was one of the two youngest students in the classes being only 24 at the time. Most of my fellow students were age 30 or above with our oldest student being 65. Since I was single and didn’t have any dating prospects at the time, I felt living in the dorm was the best choice. It had turned out that way. I met students from other countries and made friends from Taiwan and Pakistan. For the first time in my life I lived with an African American student who was doing his Masters in Social Work at Marywood College. Since Marywood was an all girls school residence wise, he had gotten a room at the dorm at the University of Scranton and I just happened to be his roommate. Rich and I got along great and he introduced me to many aspects of African American culture that I had absolutely no idea about. Since I had only gone to high school with three African American students in my graduating class of 999 students, my only exposure to African American students prior to meeting Rich was the two of out of the three I played sports with in high school.

Back to the dance. After tossing my coat and hat in one of the bedrooms in the house I joined the group of students and tried to talk to my friend Bob, who was also one of my research partners. Unfortunately the din had grown to the point where it was almost impossible to hear anything except the loud music since the living room and dinning room areas were pretty small in this house for the size of the crowd. Working my way through the crowd I decided to stop at the buffet and drinks tables since I hadn’t eaten dinner prior to driving up. I knew there would be food and drinks here so I left my family home on Allentown before they had dinner. With my mouth half full of appetizers one of my fellow female students, Judy, asked me to dance. While Judy was a good bit older than me, we often did collaborative projects together and I had a crush on her. She was single and I had never really dated an older woman or girl before, but we weren’t actually dating just doing study groups, classes, and projects together, which you really can’t count as dates. I was thrilled that she asked me to dance. Gulping down

a Lebanon Baloney and Cream cheese roll and swallowing a mouthful of punch, I nodded that I would love to dance with her as she grabbed my hand and pulled me toward a semi-open spot on the dance floor. The music was definitely the type of rock and roll you didn’t really dance close too just moved your bodies to the same tempo while dancing at least a foot apart. I like doing this, since I had been doing this since attend the 9 Y Jive every Friday night at the local YMCA during 9th Grade, and then all through High School at the dances there every Saturday night. We had live DJ’s like Freaky Freddy Milander, and actually some live groups like Herman and the Hermits, and Jay and the Techniques, and a couple of other local bands as well. It wasn’t as big as Notre Dame Bandstand with Gene K who brought in top named rock stars or Castle Garden at Dorney Park, but we still got great crowds at the YMCA dances as well.

Judy and I danced together most of that night. I did have a dance or two with Mark’s fiance Marlene, but I think Mark put her up to asking me and maybe to give Judy a break. I actually felt like this was like having an actual date with Judy especially when Midnight came and she gave me a kiss after we all stopped to watch the ball in Time’s Square drop on Mark’s TV. It was only a kiss on the cheek, but it was still a kiss. We all stayed about another hour after the ball dropped and finished off some drinks and food that was left and did some slow dancing to kind of cool things down. Gradually we all left. Since the dorm was closed for the holidays, I was headed back home. Since I didn’t have much alcohol to drink, only one or two cups of the spiked punch and stuck to soda most of the night, I felt I was okay to drive back home. Since I had to go back to work in two days on my internship, I didn’t really have a choice but to head home. The drive back was quiet and peaceful. Hardly a car on the road since it was almost 2:30 am when I started back.

I spent most of the drive back home listening to a late night radio broadcast on WPLJ out of New York City and thinking about Judy and the great time I had that evening. It was absolutely wonderful celebrating New Year’s Eve with so many friends and fellow students. I would miss most of them for the rest of the semester. All of my class would be doing internships, scattered across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Delaware. The only one of my fellow students I would see would be Bob Yeager one of my two research partners. Since he was doing his internship at Allentown State Hospital and living just outside of Bangor he was close by and we would be able to work together on our research and thesis papers. Our other partner was out in Pittsburgh and he had to communicate with us by phone.

I reached home exhausted but suddenly wide awake as the cold early morning air blasted my face as I parked my car. Driving back in my Chevy Malibu rag top wasn’t all that warm either, but I was so busy with my thoughts that I somehow forgot the usual cold that turned my feet purple as I drove back and forth to the University during the winter months. I was deeply grateful for my friends and fellow classmates. They had helped me grow up quite a bit since leaving college, and I finally felt like I could handle this internship instead of my fears and anxieties over managing the other two, one at the University Counseling Center and the other at a Women’s Correctional Facility outside of Scranton. Perhaps it was just the relaxation and fun of dancing with someone I liked or just the joy of being able to celebrate New Year’s in a new way than I had previously, but whatever it was, I was feeling great as I unlocked the door to my family home. I quietly headed up to my bedroom trying not to wake my next oldest brother who home before finishing his last semester in college or my other three siblings and parents who were fast asleep after probably greeting the New Year’s as well. There were still some empty food trays and beverage cans in the kitchen as I entered from the back door after parking my car at the garage in the back of the house. I was hopeful that their New Year’s Eve and my parents had been as joyful as mine.

Technology Lesson:

Celebrating joyful moments using technology is important thing we can teach our students and ourselves. With the advent of really good quality cameras on smartphones, tablets, and laptops we have wonderful tools to take photos and videos that we can share with others. We can use the built in microphones and speakers to listen to and record great music or our own songs, poems, or other things we would like to share. We can also create greeting cards, or drawing using some terrific software and printing tools. We can make paper decorations or paper toys and games using lots of available templates online. Finding great simple recipes that even our kids can make for class parties, or simple directions for making party favors that our students can make are also things we can do using the power of the Internet. We can do live interactive sessions with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Apple Face-time. In the classroom we can also use Bloomz, Class Dojo, SeeSaw or ParentSquare to share notes of encouragement, photos, or even short videos of some great things our students are doing. Celebrating is a vital part of bring life and joy to our classrooms. We should be doing this as often as possible. Our classrooms aren’t just places for learning facts and basic skills, they are also places that should bring joy and sharing and learning communication skills that will help them to be people of hospitality as they continue to grow. We may assume they already know this, but there are often homes in which celebrations are not common, or there are stresses or circumstances at home that may make it difficult to celebrate or share in celebrations with others. As teachers we have the opportunity to make this happen for those students too. Recently following the severe flooding from Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, a teacher relative of mine in Black Mountain, asked for others to donate some stuff toys to her kindergarten students to help them feel welcome and safe when coming back to school for the first time. While I was able to help provide one of those for one of her students, others donated so that every single student had a stuffed animal waiting for them on their desks the first day back to school. It was a wonderful way for them to celebrate the return after such devastation and loss in their community. While we don’t have to wait for a devastating event to do something like this, any annual or special feast, festival or holiday can be an opportunity to teach our students how to celebrate and use the digital tools at their disposal for something more than just playing games and entertaining themselves.