Chapter 9D

Too Many Screens

As my AP class filtered into the room, I smiled and greeted them.
“You came back!” I said excitedly.
Amber just smiled, but Emma and Lauryn gave me quizzical looks.
“You were expecting us not to, Mr. Brock?” Emma asked, clearly bemused.
“Yeah, Mr. Brock, why wouldn’t we come back?” Hailey said, joining the group.
“Because when I have to give the ‘Welcome to Hell’ speech that very first Day Zero,” I told them truthfully. “Not everyone has come back for the actual first official day of class.”
“You’re kidding, Mr. Brock!” declared Lauryn.
“Nope.” I shook my head. “It’s only happened once in the twenty years since I started giving that speech, but it has happened.”
“Well, we’re made of stronger stuff.” Emma responded, finishing unpacking for class.
“Yeah!” Adele added, setting her backpack down and joining the conversation. “We’re ready for it, Mr. Brock. ‘Biology Bootcamp’ you said the other day? Bring it on!”
I smiled in reply and had to fight not to give a shake of my head. They never really believe you, I told myself. Not until they actually experience it for themselves.
The rest of my students finished unpacking, and I took a quick glance around the room for attendance. It was a mixed group of juniors and seniors this year, and they had sorted themselves out in their seating just about the way I would have expected. Always interesting to see their friend groupings, I thought.
After pressing the link that said everyone was here, I walked back to the front of the room, picking up a book along the way, and stood very deliberately at the center of their attention.
“Before we get started today,” I said. “I need to share some information with all of you so that as students, you can make some informed decisions about how you tackle this class.” I held up the book. “And so you know that I am not just making this stuff up,” I told them. “Here is one of the many sources of the research, and you are welcome to borrow it and read for yourself any time you choose.”
Katherine politely interrupted. “Like you’re going to lie to us, Mr. Brock.” She teased, shaking her head with a grin in disbelief.
“Never the less,” I replied. “A good scientist knows their sources.”
I set the book down and continued.
“First, because I need to get you all ready for science at the next level where lecture is still the main teaching method, unlike ninth grade, there will be lectures in this course.” I told them. “I try to keep them to a minimum, and I record them and post them online so that you can go back and revisit them. But it means you will need to take notes in this class, and that is item one from the research: you learn better when you take notes by hand than you do when using a laptop. You are still free to use your laptops for note taking in this class if you wish; just know that doing so will make it harder for your brain to learn the material.”
I paused to let that sink in, and there were some nods and intrigued looks.
Then I made a dramatic show of reaching into my left pocket, hauling out my smartphone, and holding it high.
“Second,” I stated. “This is the enemy of your brain. “We will actually learn the science of why when we study the nervous system and talk more about your hippocampus later in the year, but for now, I am letting you know that simply having this device on your person decreases your working memory by the equivalent of a full letter grade. So if you are striving to operate on a given day with an A-level brain, this device guarantees you are limited to a B-level ability if it is anywhere near your person.”
I paused again, letting that sink in, and this time, there were expressions of open discomfort on their faces.
“In fact, that is true for every screen you have open.” I told them. “So if you are taking notes on your laptop or doing your homework on your computer and you have this device on your person, that A-level brain just became a C-level brain.”
Discomfort had turned to anxiety on a couple of faces, and Maddy raised her hand.
“Mr. Brock, why didn’t you tell all of us this at the start of ninth grade?” She asked.
I stopped talking, turned, and just gave her my “Seriously? There ARE dumb questions” look.
“Oh. Right.” She responded, a little self-consciously. “I forgot. Terrified.”
“Mm, hm.” I reminded her. “It’s usually not until late November at the earliest before you all start thinking that maybe this Mr. Brock guy isn’t so bad after all.”
Those who had had me before all chuckled at the memory, and Maddy grinned.
“Anyway,” I continued. “Again, I am not going to tell you what you should or should not do with your digital devices. I just think as students you need to make whatever choice you make in an informed fashion.”
I lowered the phone in my hand.
“And because I believe that all of you deserve my A-level brain,” I announced. “I’m now going to go put this back in my briefcase in the science prep room, and then we’ll get started.”
I headed quickly out the door and down the hall the short distance to where my desk resided, making sure as I dropped off the phone that it was muted so that it would not interfere with any of my colleagues working, and then, I headed back to the room—where as I approached the door, I found my entire class putting away their devices in their backpacks.
I won’t lie: it was a sight that made me both proud and hopeful.

A Voiceless World?

The statistics on digital technology’s impact on education can be both overwhelming and depressing.  Research has shown that as a student’s multi-tasking and social media consumption go up, there is a direct relationship with how much his, her, or their GPA goes down.  Seventy-five percent of school-aged individuals report feeling panic when they cannot immediately locate their smartphones, even when made aware that the absence of this device would actually decrease the amount of time it takes to complete their homework, giving them more free time.  Furthermore, though shown that their texting during classes had caused college students to perform 30% worse on their assessments, this knowledge did not alter their behavior in any way.⁴⁸

Moreover, statistics such as these only a scratch at the surface.  The very tool that distracts our students is now the dominate tool for managing and completing their homework, and as Homayoun has observed, this always-on access to grades and the nearly universal sharing of test scores and other accomplishments has led to a comparison culture of “never enough,” where “students now alter their expectations to focus on how they are doing relative to others” and are no longer “concentrating on their own learning process” and how much personal growth they are accomplishing.⁴⁹  No longer is academic success identified with achieving personal purpose or potential.  Instead, it has become—as the kids say—“all about the ‘likes’,” leaving our students each day worrying more and more about the rather banal and narcissistic values of celebrity and fame than they do about their schooling and what it could mean for who they become as adults.⁵⁰

Yet, as difficult as it may be to hear all these impacts technology is having on teaching and learning—a situation M.I.T. professor Sherry Turkle has suggested is causing what were once considered pathologies to become normalized⁵¹—I want to argue that the greatest risk our digital age brings to education is the loss of perhaps thinking’s most important function:  creativity.  To be creative first requires being bored, and our always-on, immediate-response, FOMO-addicted world “leaves little time for reflection, deep thinking, or even just simply sitting back and letting our random thoughts drive us to places we might not have [otherwise] gone.”⁵² But even more significant, in a world where no one gets lost anymore, we have chosen to upload our memory to the Cloud, and that is even more problematic than not making space for boredom because our brain’s capacity for creativity is directly proportional to the amount of information in its long-term memory (LTM). 

The reason for this is that at its core, creativity is the novel combination of ideas, and “the more existing ideas you have in your head, the more varied and richer will be your novel combinations of them.”⁵³ But that would seem to suggest—as my skeptical technophiles are no doubt already starting to scream—that since the Internet is a nearly infinite source of ideas, technology should actually be the greatest source for creativity the world has ever known.  However, the part of the brain where ideas get brought into our awareness is the hippocampus, and the hippocampus is—you guessed it!—genetically hard-wired by its evolutionary history to look in one location and only one location for its source of ideas:  LTM.  The hippocampus simply cannot mingle ideas from an external source the way it does ideas from LTM, and therefore, if an idea is not in LTM, the hippocampus cannot use it for purposes of creative thinking.  Yet that means that “the emptier our long-term memories, the harder we find it to think.  [Hence,] anyone who stops learning facts for himself because he can Google them later is literally making himself stupid.”⁵⁴  Or to put it another way, in a world of increasingly complex problems, digital technology has not only made it harder for us to stand still to confront them, it is destroying our actual capacity to tackle them in the first place.  As Turkle poetically summarizes the situation, “among all its bounties, here the Internet has given us a new way not to think.”⁵⁵

Coda

So where as educators does all of this leave us? Our digital world is not going away, and indeed, I would like to emphasize at this juncture that much of the work and research of the people I have cited so heavily in this chapter is about how to adapt to what Gazzaley & Rosen have called in their book’s subtitle our “ancient brains in a high-tech world.”  The efforts of these psychologists, neurologists, and educators focus as much on how to address the challenges of the digital age as they do on identifying the challenges themselves, and I strongly encourage anyone who teaches to make the time to read their full work. 

However, I have deliberately focused on technology’s potential perils to an authentically engaged education because, as I think Turkle again says so elegantly:

we need to get into new and more disciplined habits where we examine the assumption that we are getting something important from these new technologies.  We must ask whether a technology expands our capacities and possibilities or exploits our vulnerabilities….  Technology offered us sugared soda water, and we embraced it.  We took over a hundred years to decide it was no good for us at all.  But by the time we declared it toxic, [we had an epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes on our hands].⁵⁶

The simple truth is that it is one thing for our adult minds to grapple with the identified hazards of the digital world; it is another for the undeveloped minds of our children.  Like Turkle, I believe that we have “already completed a forbidden experiment, using ourselves as subjects with no controls,”⁵⁷ and I genuinely do fear that we may have already lost an entire generation to B-level brains (or worse!), struggling in an age of A+ problems. 

My prayer is that we do not make it two.  We do not have a hundred years this time to discover that we’ve created digital “soda.”