It's Getting Worse!
I've written in this blog (sporadically, as some of you faithful readers know) for more than four years, and it has become a very handy place to catalogue the fads and frustrations of teaching in a junior high school. The intended audience for these scribblings is always my current Honors English class (although I know there are plenty of former students, parents, colleagues, and friends who also stop by now and again), and I try to keep my reflections as fresh as possible. But lately I have been battling a nagging frustration with many of my students who don't seem to be able to focus on anything for more than about thirty seconds, and I feel that I should say something about it, even though I already did so three years ago. You see, it's getting worse!
It's educational blasphemy to admit this, but there was a time when I didn't believe there really was such a thing as attention deficit disorder. Now, however, I am sure it exists...because every teenager I know suffers from it. My daughter, who is now 16 and about whom I have written at some length in other posts, cannot listen to any song for more than 30 seconds. She's got 80 gigabytes of memory on her iPod, and her music collection is growing fast enough (due to the fact that she co-opts all my music!) that she could fill it within the next few months. If she wanted to, she could jog all the way across the United States and never have to hear the same song twice. But she never actually listens to an entire song! So impatient is she, that if the first few bars of a song do not immediately captivate her fancy and fulfill her specific musical need for that very moment, she will blithely skip to the next song. No biggie, right? But she'll do it twenty or thirty times in a row, skipping songs faster than I can even identify them. I guess it's fine for her to do so when she's isolated under her headphones, but a two-mile ride in the car with her becomes a ten-minute plummet into audio hell. I don't get to hear any one song all the way through, but rather the first ten seconds of 47 different songs. It's not even possible for me to determine if I like most of them or not because I never hear enough of them to make such a judgement.
It's not just my own kids, of course, and it isn't a generational thing. It seems that the entire culture of modern America has lost its ability to pay attention. Yeah, yeah, I know: Teachers will always complain about that. But I'm not talking about the classroom! Look around. Have you heard about the recent spate of auto wrecks (and subsequent deaths) caused by people using cell phones while driving? Although we all know that driving a car safely requires more or less one's full attention, many (probably most) people seem perfectly willing to quit paying attention to the road to first go hunting for the buzzing cell phone and then to spend the rest of the drive in conversation with someone who's probably running a stoplight on the other side of town. And this is to say nothing of the deadly "accidents" caused by people texting and driving. Texting! Is it really that hard to just ignore (or turn off) the distraction until you can give it your full attention? Apparently so. The death toll is rising.
Ten years ago, one of the biggest selling points of new computers was their ability to "multi-task." In other words, they had the speed and memory to run numerous programs all at the same time. You could be checking your e-mail while writing your essay for U.S. History while listening to music while sending an instant message to your pal. And that was a good thing! But nowadays that sort of performance is expected not just from computers but also from humanity. The technological tools that were supposed to streamline our lives and make us more productive no longer serve us. We serve them. We're the tools.
I'm not exempt. Right now, I am sitting at the back of my classroom while my 2nd period class is working on a pre-writing activity for what will become a persuasive paper. I know that in six minutes I'll be standing up to make sure they have finished and talking them into the next phase of the writing process. In the meantime, I can begin writing this paragraph, respond to an e-mail from a former student who is going to be my intern for a couple months, and mark attendance. I'm going in many directions even at this moment. Now it's 4th period. I'm still sort of working on this blog, but I am distracted by all the other stuff going on here before me: Six windows open, two unfinished e-mails, attendance yet to be marked, and now there is a flashing icon in the lower-right corner reminding me of updates that are available for my computer. Is it any wonder we can't produce thoughtful, quality products when we don't devote our full attention to anything? (This is the reason I haven't done many blogs in the last year or so: I don't feel like I can give them the attention they deserve. I have lots of ideas, but I have even more distractions.)
Part of the reason I always end up pointing back to technological innovations when I give examples about the world's inability to focus on anything is because those innovations are specifically designed to encourage us to multi-task. They divide our attention, spreading it so thin that we can't genuinely focus on anything. The reason cell phones are cool is because you don't have to be connected to a landline somewhere; you can use them while you do other things. But just because we can do something doesn't necessarily mean that we should. Using computers may increase productivity, but increased productivity is meaningless if the quality of the product goes down. Yet the general feeling seems to be that if technology will do it for you, why bother to know how to do it for yourself? I consider this every time I ask students to figure a score on a paper and they have to reach for a calculator to multiply two single-digit numbers. I consider this every time I have a student tell me that there are no errors in a paper because he spell-checked it (without regard for the differences in meaning of the correctly spelled words their, they're, and there). I consider this every time I see someone use a cell phone to make a lame excuse about why s/he's late and every time I find myself checking my Facebook page when the real reason I logged on was to update my classroom website for tomorrow's lesson.
One of the many problems with this multi-tasking gone awry is that people don't read as much as they should. Oh, sure, they check the headlines, browse magazines, pick and choose the most outrageous or provocative stories available on the Internet each day, and occasionally read an entire best-seller that Oprah recommended, but for the most part we appear to be a post-literate society. That means we can read, but we choose not to. Why? There's so much else to do, and most of it is so much more immediately gratifying than reading.
I don't think multi-tasking is all it's cracked up to be, and I think we ought to be fighting back, maintaining our focus, and reading more good books. Before it's too late.
It's educational blasphemy to admit this, but there was a time when I didn't believe there really was such a thing as attention deficit disorder. Now, however, I am sure it exists...because every teenager I know suffers from it. My daughter, who is now 16 and about whom I have written at some length in other posts, cannot listen to any song for more than 30 seconds. She's got 80 gigabytes of memory on her iPod, and her music collection is growing fast enough (due to the fact that she co-opts all my music!) that she could fill it within the next few months. If she wanted to, she could jog all the way across the United States and never have to hear the same song twice. But she never actually listens to an entire song! So impatient is she, that if the first few bars of a song do not immediately captivate her fancy and fulfill her specific musical need for that very moment, she will blithely skip to the next song. No biggie, right? But she'll do it twenty or thirty times in a row, skipping songs faster than I can even identify them. I guess it's fine for her to do so when she's isolated under her headphones, but a two-mile ride in the car with her becomes a ten-minute plummet into audio hell. I don't get to hear any one song all the way through, but rather the first ten seconds of 47 different songs. It's not even possible for me to determine if I like most of them or not because I never hear enough of them to make such a judgement.
It's not just my own kids, of course, and it isn't a generational thing. It seems that the entire culture of modern America has lost its ability to pay attention. Yeah, yeah, I know: Teachers will always complain about that. But I'm not talking about the classroom! Look around. Have you heard about the recent spate of auto wrecks (and subsequent deaths) caused by people using cell phones while driving? Although we all know that driving a car safely requires more or less one's full attention, many (probably most) people seem perfectly willing to quit paying attention to the road to first go hunting for the buzzing cell phone and then to spend the rest of the drive in conversation with someone who's probably running a stoplight on the other side of town. And this is to say nothing of the deadly "accidents" caused by people texting and driving. Texting! Is it really that hard to just ignore (or turn off) the distraction until you can give it your full attention? Apparently so. The death toll is rising.
Ten years ago, one of the biggest selling points of new computers was their ability to "multi-task." In other words, they had the speed and memory to run numerous programs all at the same time. You could be checking your e-mail while writing your essay for U.S. History while listening to music while sending an instant message to your pal. And that was a good thing! But nowadays that sort of performance is expected not just from computers but also from humanity. The technological tools that were supposed to streamline our lives and make us more productive no longer serve us. We serve them. We're the tools.
I'm not exempt. Right now, I am sitting at the back of my classroom while my 2nd period class is working on a pre-writing activity for what will become a persuasive paper. I know that in six minutes I'll be standing up to make sure they have finished and talking them into the next phase of the writing process. In the meantime, I can begin writing this paragraph, respond to an e-mail from a former student who is going to be my intern for a couple months, and mark attendance. I'm going in many directions even at this moment. Now it's 4th period. I'm still sort of working on this blog, but I am distracted by all the other stuff going on here before me: Six windows open, two unfinished e-mails, attendance yet to be marked, and now there is a flashing icon in the lower-right corner reminding me of updates that are available for my computer. Is it any wonder we can't produce thoughtful, quality products when we don't devote our full attention to anything? (This is the reason I haven't done many blogs in the last year or so: I don't feel like I can give them the attention they deserve. I have lots of ideas, but I have even more distractions.)
Part of the reason I always end up pointing back to technological innovations when I give examples about the world's inability to focus on anything is because those innovations are specifically designed to encourage us to multi-task. They divide our attention, spreading it so thin that we can't genuinely focus on anything. The reason cell phones are cool is because you don't have to be connected to a landline somewhere; you can use them while you do other things. But just because we can do something doesn't necessarily mean that we should. Using computers may increase productivity, but increased productivity is meaningless if the quality of the product goes down. Yet the general feeling seems to be that if technology will do it for you, why bother to know how to do it for yourself? I consider this every time I ask students to figure a score on a paper and they have to reach for a calculator to multiply two single-digit numbers. I consider this every time I have a student tell me that there are no errors in a paper because he spell-checked it (without regard for the differences in meaning of the correctly spelled words their, they're, and there). I consider this every time I see someone use a cell phone to make a lame excuse about why s/he's late and every time I find myself checking my Facebook page when the real reason I logged on was to update my classroom website for tomorrow's lesson.
One of the many problems with this multi-tasking gone awry is that people don't read as much as they should. Oh, sure, they check the headlines, browse magazines, pick and choose the most outrageous or provocative stories available on the Internet each day, and occasionally read an entire best-seller that Oprah recommended, but for the most part we appear to be a post-literate society. That means we can read, but we choose not to. Why? There's so much else to do, and most of it is so much more immediately gratifying than reading.
I don't think multi-tasking is all it's cracked up to be, and I think we ought to be fighting back, maintaining our focus, and reading more good books. Before it's too late.
posted by MRT at 1:30 PM
1 Comments:
You have indeed written in this very sporadically, too sporadically. Like perhaps every FEW months, when your Honors students have to (supposed to) right them every week. Tsk tsk.
But I agree with the multi-tasking thing. This comment, for example, is when I should be doing my Ap American History homework, but instead I am reading this blog =D
And multi-tasking has created a "quantity over quality" kind of thing; you can do many things at once, but you spend less time on each one and thus does not really benefit one in the end.
Glad to see you still blog though :D
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