We ran into one of our kids’ elementary-school teachers in the neighborhood a couple of nights ago. Chatting (across the street), she said that she thought her young students could grow up unable to read facial expressions, because the strangers they see are all masked.
Not that we’re going to be masked up forever (are we?) but she teaches first grade, and her students are losing prime learning time. It seemed obvious … until I thought about it.
What do we hide when we are masked, and what do we expose?
We hide the part of our face that lies—the mouth that does what we bid it—and we expose the part that subtly tells the truth despite us.
So whither first graders? Will they be expression-blind, because they have missed an opportunity to make the connections between voluntary expressions and emotions, or will they be particularly canny about facial expressions, because they have learned to detect emotions in twenty square inches of face above the bridge of the nose?