It is not conceivable that our culture will forget that it needs children.
But it is halfway to forgetting that children need childhood.
Those who insist on remembering shall perform a noble service.
–Neil Postman
Facts do not cease to exist just because they are ignored.
–Aldous Huxley
Not Found in App Stores
“Mr. Brock?”
I looked up from where I was refocusing a microscope to see both Paige and Emma with their hands raised. I flashed them an index finger to indicate ‘just a moment’ and finished fixing the slide I was working.
I turned to Grace and Irina. “There. Someone had bumped the stage. The pointer’s back on the right cell again.”
“Thank you, Mr. Brock,” replied Grace as Irina leaned in to observe the corrected slide.
I walked over to my waiting students, noticing that everyone else seemed to be moving smoothly back and forth across the room as they completed the assignment, and stood next to the lab bench.
“Yes?” I queried.
“Mr. Brock, I don’t see how you can figure out which interphase cell comes at the beginning and which one goes at the end.” Emma told me. “Number six or number three?”
“Well, what happens during interphase?” I asked her.
“It’s when normal cell life happens.” She replied.
“And what else?” I asked. She furrowed her brow, and I continued. “What are we studying right now?”
“Mitosis.” Paige answered instead of Emma.
“And what critical process has to take place during the interphase stage of a cell’s life for mitosis to happen?” I asked.
Two sets of furrowed brows greeted me this time. So I pointed at the board where I had diagramed replication earlier in the class.
“Oh, the DNA gets copied.” Paige replied, Emma nodding in agreement.
“So what do you think that might do to the size of the nucleus?” I queried.
“Make it bigger.” They both answered together.
I sensed motion and realized that much of the class had wandered over to join the conversation.
“But how does knowing that help?” Mellie questioned from behind me.
“What’s different about the two slides?” I asked, pointing at the microscope in front of us and then at the other one across the room. “What do your observations tell you?”
Paige took a quick look in the eyepiece and then down at her drawings and notes. “I think six here is bigger.” She answered.
I looked at Emma. “Do you agree?”
She took a quick peek, and responded, “Yes.”
I deliberately looked her in the eye, then, and said, “So if you were ordering all of these slides as if you were making one of those flip-book ‘movies’ you made back in grade school, which slide would come at the start of a ‘movie’ about the cell life-cycle?”
Both girls got a look of sudden understanding on their faces, but Emma audibly gasped. “THIS ONE!” She cried out.
“Very good. Now you have the start of your ‘movie’ and its ending.” I told her. “You just have to put the rest of them in order.”
“But Mr. Brock, that’s impossible!” complained Grace, who was now standing next to me.
“Yeah, Mr. Brock!” chimed in Irina.
“No. It’s not.” I responded firmly. “What it does require is that for each of the stages of mitosis where you have two slides in the same phase, you have to think about how the appearance of the chromosomes would be changing over the course of that phase.”
“But that means you’re asking us to think, Mr. Brock!” Irina moaned.
“Yes, and you all know my response to that.” I added.
“ ‘There isn’t an app for that.’ ” Grace parroted, glaring at me ever so slightly.
“Yup! There isn’t.” I said. “And that’s why you’re here.”
The Myth of Multitasking
Thinking is in danger. It is under assault from today’s technology, and those of us in education are on the front lines. Distracted students and hovering parents, smaller vocabularies and declining reading skills, an inability to concentrate and a loss of empathy…the list of negative impacts the now ubiquitous presence of digital devices in our lives has produced could—and has!—filled books. Furthermore, as a classroom teacher who is both a neuroscientist and a “digital immigrant,” I have witnessed the transition and its impact on my students’ cognitive abilities firsthand.
Yet, before I get ignored for promoting some Neo-Luddite agenda and my younger readers dismiss me with the mean-spirited meme “Okay, Boomer,” I need to preface my remaining thoughts in this chapter by pointing out that I am not anti-technology. After all, I am publishing this project on a blog, and for the past two decades, I have designed and maintained three websites at my former school. My father and I enjoy texting back and forth while watching sporting events “together” in our respective cities, and I actually prefer streaming my favorite PBS show, NOVA, to watching it on TV.
But like any form of technology, the Internet of Everything (as it is coming to be) has negative as well as positive consequences for our lives, and we must be willing to confront the potential harmful effects of today’s digital world with clear and open minds if we wish to live safe and healthy lives. Cars, after all, have speed limits for a reason, and as renowned neurologist Adam Gazzaley and psychologist Larry Rosen have demonstrated through nearly a decade now of research, the “speeding” danger of the Internet of Everything is that it “degrades our perceptions, influences our language, hinders effective decision making, and derails our ability to capture and recall detailed memories of life events”1—all critical and consequential aspects of thinking. What’s more, their research has gone on to show that “the negative impact is even greater for those of us with undeveloped or impaired cognitive control, such as children, teens, and older adults.”2 Therefore, those of us in education have an even greater imperative to deal with any detrimental side-effects of digital technology, and I am here to argue that one of them is a hinderance in our students’ capacity to think.
And my reason for doing so once again has to do with the genetically pre-determined hard-wiring of that organ inside our heads. The human brain evolved so that it “naturally focuses on concepts sequentially, one at a time.”3 What that means in practical terms is that every single time a person shifts their focus from one thing to another, they have literally stopped thinking about the first thing. Thus, for example, if you are presently trying to text or e-mail while also trying to read this paragraph, your brain first employs neurons to shift to reading screen #1. Then it next employs the neurons that encode the rules for reading screen-type #1. That is followed by the neurons that disengage from screen-type #1 neurons to shift to reading screen #2, and finally, your brain employs those neurons that encode the rules for reading screen-type #2. This four-stage process in your brain is always linear, always in this order, and your brain does it every single time you switch attention.4
Thus, while the typical student today believes he, she, or they can juggle 6-7 different forms of media at the same time, the reality is that he, she, or they are preventing his, her, or their brain from thinking in an attentive manner about any of these media. The notion of multi-tasking is a myth; the brain can only single task, and therefore, as the brain is made to switch back and forth repeatedly, this common use of technology actively hinders an individual’s ability to think. In fact, to get a sense of just how jarring the myth of multi-tasking is for the brain, I encourage readers to pause here and try a simple activity provided by Gazzaley and Rosen from their research. First, as rapidly as possible, count out loud the numbers 1 thru 10. Then, do the same for the letters A thru J. Now, alternate letters and numbers out loud (“A1,” “B2,” “C3,” etc.), again as rapidly as possible.5
Enlightening, isn’t it? Not only does so-called multi-tasking slow down the brain’s thinking processes, it also costs the brain enormous amounts of energy to engage in all that attention switching,6 and “that’s why a person who is interrupted takes 50 percent longer to accomplish a task and makes 50 percent more errors”7 while doing so. It is also why when given the task to learn something while a screen was present, “students could not focus for more than three to five minutes even when they were told to study something very important.”8 The simple truth is that any over-use of digital technologies lowers an individual’s efficiency and productivity, decreases the ability to problem-solve, and interferes with the capacity to learn.9
And anyone who doesn’t think our children are over-using digital technologies isn’t paying attention. They look at their smartphones alone on at least 27 times per day on average, with some looking at them more than 150 times,10 and 92% of ages 10-18 are on-line as well every day for an average of 9 hours (in addition to any time spent on-line on school work!).11 Eighty percent of teens report picking up their phones within 15 minutes of waking, and a staggering 24% of them say they keep them within arm’s length 24 hours a day, answering texts and tweets even at night. In addition, 95% report multi-tasking at least a third of their day, including texting on average 100 times or more, and if these statistics do not convince you that our children are over-using their digital technologies, then know this: each minute—yes, minute—there are on average 284,722 Snapchats, 1,736,111 Instagram photos, and 300 hours’ worth of YouTube videos downloaded12—and who knows what the stats for TikTok will be once researchers start collecting that data!
In the meantime, the consequences for education are clear: that is a lot of thinking being hindered, and as we will see next, those of us in today’s classroom have seen the spillover. But from the “35,000 foot perspective,” the view is equally clear: unless all of us who are stakeholders in education start rethinking the role the new digital age should play in our children’s lives, we risk a world where the quality of the thinking won’t match the difficulty of the challenges confronting it—and even Oz’s Scarecrow can tell you what’s wrong with that.
Light a Candle 