In the rise of the technological era, Jessica Lahitou has some suggestions on how to handle attachment and detachment for students and their devices.
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The four years of my high school experience were not my finest. Not hardly. The many trials of my 1997 – 2001 era included a school with excessively high academic standards, excessively low tolerance for lateness (one tardy too many cost me a two-point GPA drop), a dysfunctional teenage relationship to food and my body, and plenty of the regular hormonal antics. The boys I liked, the few who liked me, the incredibly rare instance of those attractions aligning.
As much of these problems originated and dwelled at school, I could leave them after I left the building. Home was not always a haven (I have two sisters, so there were three teenaged girls under one roof, so you know… there was that). But I could close the door to my room and have a quiet space to be alone.
I can’t imagine school drama following me home, nor can I imagine trying to fend off the urge technology offers as an escape. If a smartphone had sat in my back pocket, I would have avoided so many awkward, and at times unbearable, close-contact moments. Riding on the track team bus next to someone you might call cute, or listening to the senior girl who sits behind you mock your new haircut.
But it is often in those quiet and uncomfortable moments that we learn who we are, and how to be human.
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In his 2012 Newsweek article “Is the Internet Making Us Crazy,” Tony Dokoupil lays out the case that indeed it is. From the article, some evidential quotes:
- “Peter Whybrow, the director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, argues that “the computer is like electronic cocaine,” fueling cycles of mania followed by depressive stretches.”
- “It [Internet]‘fosters our obsessions, dependence, and stress reactions,’ adds Larry Rosen, a California psychologist who has researched the Net’s effect for decades. It ‘encourages—and even promotes—insanity.’”
- “The brains of Internet addicts, it turns out, look like the brains of drug and alcohol addicts.”
But you don’t need to read an exhaustive research paper to be convinced. Most of us, it turns out, feel dismally confident that we are attached to our technology in unhealthy ways. Given that most smart phone users check their phones at least every fifteen minutes, we are undeniably in full-dependence mode.
Having taught middle and high school students, they are unsurprisingly no different. Immersed in technology from childhood, we refer to them in education as “Digital Natives.” Strange as it may be to contemplate, Facebook and Twitter, iPhones and Google, will have always existed for them.
The Internet can be a great boon to education, if it utilized in the right way. But too often, students get caught up in all the entertainment and social aspects of being online, rather than using the Internet as a tool for learning. I don’t blame them. Is reading a website on the history of British monarchs as immediately gratifying as surfing Instagram?
Doubtful.
And yet, the personal implications of social media concern me even more. Students no longer have to bully each other in the hallways; they can do it from the comfort of their desk, or couch, or bedroom. They can unfriend each other, or post some derogatory comments on a Facebook Wall, or send a mean text. And this can happen anywhere, any time. All hours of the day are open season for teenaged nastiness.
And they live on, permanently. The Internet has given cutting remarks a lifetime warranty.
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All the more reason, then, to start talking explicitly about how and when using technology is appropriate.
More than any other generation, today’s young people need to know how to navigate this new world of constant connectedness and interruption. Probably more than anything else, they need to learn how to turn it off, how to ignore it.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers on how to go about this. But here are some starter ideas:
- Have students track how often they use their phones. Just seeing the regularity may startle them.
- Have students monitor how they feel after being in front of the screen. Are they happier? Are they more stressed? Is there a pattern?
- Have students pick a set time period during which they will be screen-free. An hour in the morning or evening, to start. Then ask them to honestly assess how they felt and discuss their answers. Again, their own responses may surprise them.
- Teach students how to be polite online. How to remember that on the other end of that screen sits an actual human being. That they are not, as John Oliver proposed, just screaming into the void.
- Remind students that should they ever be deprived of the Internet, they will, in fact, survive.
As a final note, I would add this: we must teach students that they can use technology to promote the good things they believe in. I was recently blessed to hear the story of a young lady who used her online social media presence to publicly encourage others. This positive online presence changed her persona altogether, so that she became known as dependably kind, an encouraging peer.
It all comes down to being mindful.
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