Uncomfortable Conversations30
A knocking sound made me look up from where I was grading to see Laura and Suzanna standing at my classroom’s door, looking uncomfortable.
“Yes, ladies?” I said. “What can I do for you?”
Laura responded. “Mr. Brock? Do you have second to talk?”
“Certainly.” I nodded, setting my pen down.
“Could we please shut the door, Mr. Brock?” Suzanna asked. “It’s not something we’d like other people overhearing.”
That raised an internal “eyebrow.” But I simply replied, “All right.”
I stood up from where I had been sitting so that I could be on the same level as the two girls, and Suzanna closed the door. When she turned back, all three of us were facing each other near the front of the room.
“What seems to be the problem?” I asked.
They exchanged a furtive look, and then Laura spoke.
“It’s Karen, Mr. Brock.” She said, while Suzanna nodded vigorously, repeating. “Yes, Karen.”
There was abrupt silence as if that was all there was to the matter. So I gave them both my best “AND…?” look.
“It’s the project, Mr. Brock.” Suzanna finally continued. “Our presentation on bacteria is due tomorrow, and she still hasn’t worked on any of her slides.”
Laura nodded. “We split the questions up so that each of us was responsible for our portion of the project, and Suzanna and I have already finished our slides and uploaded them. That’s how we know Karen hasn’t done anything. She hasn’t even opened the shared doc.”
I processed this for a moment before responding.
“The documentaries on your pathogens are not due until tomorrow.” I told them. “Perhaps Karen needed to finish something else and needed to wait until today to complete her share of your project. Balancing workload is something you know we’ve spoken about in class all year. Maybe this is one of those times for Karen. Have you asked her?”
Both girls shook their heads firmly.
“No, Mr. Brock,” replied Laura. “You don’t understand. We all agreed to have our own slides done by today so that we could double-check each other’s work tonight before turning it in tomorrow morning.”
I repeated myself, emphasizing my words. “Have you asked her? Have you spoken with her about your concerns?”
Again, more head shaking.
“We’ve tried, Mr. Brock!” They replied, nearly in unison. “She isn’t answering her email,” said Suzanna. “And she won’t respond to texts,” added Laura. “She’s even ignoring the class group-chat.”
I took a moment to process this latest bit of additional data and then responded.
“Have you tried actually talking to her?” I said, stating the obvious. Turning to Laura, I added, “The two of you were sitting next to each other in the Nook during lunch today. I saw you as I was walking to the office. And I know you share some of your classes. Since she was obviously not responding to any of your other attempts at communication, did you take the time to actually speak with her about your concerns?”
From the expressions on both their faces, I might as well have just asked them to place their hands in a jar of spiders. But they tried to deflect their obvious discomfort with an excuse.
“She’s already gone home for the day.” Suzanna shared. “Her mom picked her up early for an orthodontist appointment.”
“Yes, it’s too late for us to talk with her today.” Laura added.
I knew I was showing my age, but I thought, how else are they going to learn?
“You can text Karen, right? You have her number?” I asked.
They both nodded.
“Then pick up your phone and call her.” I said sternly.
What had been mere anxiety morphed into unspeakable fear as a flood of words spilled out of both girls.
“Mr. BROCK!…Oh my god, I could never do that…NO ONE calls people, Mr. Brock!…My own mother knows better than to try and reach me that way…She’d never answer us…Don’t you understand how things are, today?…”
I held up my hand to stop the torrent.
“Ladies, you came to me for advice, and I’ve given it to you.” I said. “The rest is up to you.”
“But Mr. Brock, what if she doesn’t get her share of the work done and it hurts our grade?” complained Suzanna.
I shook my head.
“Welcome to adulthood, people.” I stated. “In the grown-up world, you will spend much of your life needing to work in small groups, and effective communication is going to be a key skill to your success in those situations.”
Both girls were too polite to express their exasperation to at me directly, but I had taught too long not to see inside their heads. So I tried a slightly different tack.
“Look, uncomfortable conversations are precisely that, uncomfortable.” I said. “I get it. I don’t enjoy them either. But to fix real problems—such as yours—they have to happen.”
I paused to see that that thought had sunk in before continuing.
“Therefore, the two of you have a choice.” I said. “You can struggle to work through your discomfort and learn how to deal with uncomfortable conversations now, while all that’s at stake is a school project. Or you can wait until you’re my age, when it could be a marriage or a job on the line.”
I took the moment to look each of them directly in the eye.
“Your call.” I told them.
Their Silenced Voices
The research is quite clear: the demands and structures of our digital age are dismantling the foundations of human relationships of all kinds, and it is not without reason that the titles of most of the citations in this chapter include “Alone Together,” “The Big Disconnect,” and “The Distracted Mind.” As psychologist and educational consultant, Robert Evans, sums it up: “this brave new [world’s] impact on the part of people’s lives that depend on relationships… has been malignant,”31 and I will argue that perhaps nowhere has this been more true than in the field of education where the acts of relationship are fundamental to the teaching and learning process and successful communication is essential to the entire endeavor. As we see with my students, they are not only becoming intellectually “voiceless,” they are on the verge of becoming literally voiceless.
Again, though, before the technophiles of this world dismiss me as antiquated irrelevance and my younger readers turn away because “the old guy just doesn’t get it,” I need to state that I am not denying the positive connectivity that the Internet of Everything has provided. It has saved lives, both literally and metaphorically, and especially for young people still struggling with their sense of identity, technology can provide a community and safe space for them which may simply not exist where they happen to reside.32 Again, as I said earlier, digital technology is no different than any other: there are pros and cons, and we have to be willing to look openly at both in order to manage its consequences for our health and well-being.
And one of those cons is how the world of screens is negatively impacting how so many of us interact with one another today. As we have repeatedly revisited, this is not the environment in which our brains evolved, and simply put, the “brain comes hardwired for human relationship because that is the most essential connection for survival.”33 Yet, “there is no app for emotional intimacy, no digital shortcut to the deep rich knowing of another human being,”34 and the research is clear that our “text driven world of rapid response”35 fails to promote the development of the necessary empathy, emotional intelligence, patience, and intimacy found in mature adult relationships.36 In fact, our text culture silences to the point where today’s children and youth consider it unacceptable to make a phone call or ask a direct question of another person, thereby “[preventing] kids (and adults) from building crucial skills that come from having tough conversations face-to-face, where facial reactions provide nonverbal communication tools typically unavailable through a screen.”37
What makes matters potentially even worse, though, is that, as we discussed in Chapter 3, the brain gets good at what it practices, rewiring itself to match the environment in which it finds itself. Therefore, our children living in this digital age are altering their neural maps for less empathy, weaker language and speech centers, and poorer socialization skills.38 Add in the fact that there is strong evidence for the possibility that our always-on world is activating the brain’s addiction centers as social media users “chase the high” from all those dopamine hits,39 and it does not surprise those of us who work daily with children to see sizeable groups of them, sitting together in absolute silence for long periods of time, just staring at their screens.
Moreover, all this silencing has consequences that reach far beyond the realm of simply dealing with the uncomfortable conversations that are integral to education. It is driving children at ever younger ages to seek advice from peers and anonymous online media communities, exposing them to “answers” to life’s questions that were once the purvue of the parents and other significant adults in their lives (e.g. many tweens and teens now routinely learn about so-called sexual intimacy through online pornography40). Even worse, many adults are “disappearing themselves [into their own technology] and offering that behavior as a model for their children.”41 Thus, absent more authentic communication in their lives, the Internet of Everything is causing potential safety nets and teachable moments to disappear, leaving our children often isolated and unprotected from “our [current] cultural infatuation with treating each other in such profoundly degrading, humiliating, and soul crushing ways.”42 Social media expert, Ana Homayoun, summarizes the situation quite well when she writes:
It’s perfectly normal for tweens and teens to make mistakes as part of the developmental process. It becomes infinitely more problematic when they make those mistakes anonymously on apps and are exposed to things they might be unprepared for socially, emotionally, or otherwise. Without guidance and support, issues can snowball and have increasingly dire consequences.43
What this entire state of affairs means for those of us in education is that we have children of all ages arriving at our schools who are exhausted from trying to multi-task all the time (losing the equivalent of 50 complete nights worth of sleep each year according to the CDC44, unable to stand still with their own thoughts, terrified of meaningful communication, and all too frequently raising themselves (at least partially) on the Internet of Everything. Is it any wonder there has been a 20-fold increase in anxiety disorders over the past 30 years?45 Chronic stress levels in adolescents—particularly young women—are now resembling those “that we used to see only in adults,”46 and between this heightened anxiety and stress, I strongly suspect that the amount of cortisol in the brains of a significant number of our “digital natives” is closing in on the lower edge of the levels once found exclusively in those suffering from PTSD.47
An entire generation with potentially 24/7 nearly PTSD brains…. And we expect them to come into our classrooms and learn.
Light a Candle 