Now that I begin to write about it, I’m not even sure if I
should call it a “flaw”—perhaps I should frame it more as an infection. The evidence
is everywhere—I’ve seen it firsthand: migrating from their pockets and purses, snaking
out underneath their hoodies, reflecting upon their faces with a sickly glow—literally. Their faces are actually illuminated by the electronic glare of the cellular phones, iPods,
and the variety of other digital paraphernalia that have completely enzombied (I make words up—just go with it) their
attention spans. While this contagion
varies from school to school, district to district, please make no mistake—it holds
no regional boundaries and its influence has reached pandemic proportions.
Before you are too quick to dismiss this as a “terrible kids
today” or “terrible teacher classroom management”-kind of dilemma, I must step
to the defense. (I may have majored in Literature, but I definitely picked up a minor in
devil’s advocacy.) I do not believe
that the young people are consciously trying to be disrespectful—in fact, I don’t
believe that they see it as any more disrespectful than we did when we passed
notes to one another in Mrs. Rose’s mind-numbing lesson on factoring
polynomials. Today’s kid just has more
expensive note-passing tools and, as a number of studies have suggested, a
shorter attention span thanks to complete media saturation. Again, to them, it’s not disrespect—it’s just an element of their cultural DNA.
In my experience, the blatancy of their inability to adhere
to the no-electronic-devices rule varies from school to school—sometimes the
students display a great deal of finesse and sophistication in their rebellion…and
sometimes, well…let’s just say that I fantasize about ripping their Beats™ from
around their necks and…well…beating
them senseless with them. I do have a
certain appreciation for the students who make efforts at subtlety—students
have pretended to nap to text, hidden their phones in their sleeves to text, buried
themselves in books to text, searched their purses for lengths of time for “something
important” to text, used the larger student in front of them as a human shield to
text, and borrowed the bathroom pass to leave the room to text (the last one is reserved for only the most courteous
offenders, of course). My favorite
ploy? The young gentlemen’s infamous stretch-and-lean-over-maneuver where
they half yawn/ half shuffle around in their pockets languidly, causing the
lowest levels of disruption that they possibly can as they text—but it’s still so obvious. My usual response?
“Hey [insert name of puckish student here], you’re clearly either masturbating or texting under your desk there
and neither one is acceptable in my class so…knock it off. Now.”
Usually this would arouse a few pink-cheeked laughs and the
phones would remain out of my line of sight for the remainder of the period. Until the next period. *sigh*
I felt like Sisyphus in 4G hell.
Without boring you with too many of the details, please know
that [most] teachers put a ton of thought,
planning, and (despite rumors that say we’re
all heartless bastards) love into
our lessons—we have, on average, five classes per day, thirty kids per class,
and about fifty minutes per section to devote to the classroom management,
curricular advancement, and socio-emotional welfare of our darling charges,
while still trying to make the experience of being locked in a box with us as
painless and personally meaningful as we possibly can for them. (Not
complaining, mind you—just dispensing information. These are simply the challenges of the career—and
a source of constant inspiration and joy to a teacher who loves what they do.)
However, when you add battling that
loveless little rectangle of circuitry for their attention (let alone their engagement in your lesson)
multiplied by all of the offending students, it’s maddening…and more than a
little disheartening. To be clear: they
know better. There is no lack of
clarity in the “rules”, including expectations and consequences, which are
indelibly etched into the syllabus and the school handbook—but there is
absolutely no compliance with this,
rendering the teachers/ counselors/ deans absolutely impotent if Little Johnny
or Little Sarah’s mommy and daddy want them to have a phone with them in a
school building. In case of an emergency, of course.
I adapted a lot of my skills as a teacher to circumvent the waning
interests of my students and to avert their desire to tune-out from the lesson
and tune-in to the latest youtube video.
I stepped up my game—I inserted the media they craved into the lessons I
planned wherever possible and I allowed them the freedom to produce electronic
projects that connected their world to the work I needed them to
accomplish. Oh, and when that didn’t
work? I’d stalk them. Yep, I’d roam
about the room while presenting information to them and when I spotted my prey,
I’d loop back over my tracks to throw off their suspicion and when they were
least expecting it—I’d pounce. I cannot even begin to count the number of
phones I snatched in my handful of years as a teacher. Though I would never publicly read their
information any sooner than I would read their notes aloud, I always glanced at
the content of their interest—the ego in me had to know what was so much more captivating than the
information or activities I had prepared for them. I could condense my findings down to a couple
of generalizations: If I grabbed the phone from a girl you could almost bank upon it being related to shopping, a
message to a girlfriend about a guy who was pissing her off, or a message to a
guy about said girlfriend who was pissing her off. If I snagged the phone from a boy, the key topics of discussion were
always hot girls, the after-party at the next game, and weed. Or if the hot girl would be at the after-party
after the next game with the weed. Period. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is the product of your $50+/month
child-protection emergency plan: the mating and recreational tool of
the American teenager.
Maybe I’m being a bit
of bitch, riding along on my tallest pony, taking a little too much smug pride in my possession of an ancient burner cell phone—the
same lame Tracfone© that I purchased over six years ago for fourteen dollars
and loaded with 400 minutes that I still have yet to dispose of—but is taking satisfaction
in not being sewn to a phone such a
bad thing? After all, where do you
suppose our children learned their behaviors? I mean, who…exactly…taught our kids
to value these devices to the degree that they do? Before I explore my hypothesis, I will
acquiesce to the fact that we know that the kids were sent to the schools accompanied
by these phones with the very best intentions—they were intended to be a means
to stay in convenient contact, an attractive global positioning device to keep
the precious progeny locatable at all times.
Why, as the child of a single mother for the better part of my life, I
know from personal experience the neurosis of always having an emergency dime—then,
as the years passed, an emergency quarter—in
my pocket so that I could always check in with my mom from a payphone. Hell, in my youth (Oh. My. God. I just joined the “back in my day”-gang, didn’t I?),
kids weren’t generally allowed to travel outside the boundaries of their mom’s
shouting range—but the liberation of the cell-phone generation comes with the
price of being at the electronic snap of the parents’ beck and (ha ha) call. As I drive my daughter home from school, I have
seen kindergarteners and first-graders walking along, cheerfully tapping away on
their tiny digital leashes. From PSPs to
DSiXLs and from Kindles to the latest iGeneration contraptions, the importance
of near-constant digital entertainment/communication has been ingrained into young
people for so long, how could they be faulted for revering these items and feeling
like constantly engaging with them is the norm?
My husband and I took our two daughters to a local park last
week for an outdoor viewing of the film “Megamind”—a
family favorite. As we were merrily
munching our popcorn and reciting the movie out loud, line for line (yeah, we’re not just annoying people at a
movie…we’re THE annoying people at a
movie), I scanned the four-hundred-or-so people around us in the park,
curious to see if we were bothering anyone.
What do you suppose I saw from my collapsible captain’s chair in the
dusky twilight? Pods of families, most
with two or more children watching the film, escorted by two eerily illuminated
parental units sitting behind them, fingers flicking into the night as they
scanned their emails, updated their facebooks, tweeted urgent nonsense to their
followers, and disengaged from the family connection experience entirely. The alien quality of the moment was so
surreal that I had to hunker down in my chair and inhale a second package of
Twizzlers just to help me calm my nerves.
I won’t be a hypocrite: I love my facebook and I, too, have
bought my children’s silence and/or compliance with an app or two when the
moment required solemnity—sometimes an electronic gag is truly a parent’s best (if only) friend. But seriously—when
did you last have an in-person conversation with someone that exceeded fifteen minutes
where they didn’t check their phone at least once (or twitch noticeably from the intrinsic compulsion to do so)? When was the last time you saw a family out
and about where one or more (or all) of
the members wasn’t searching their
brittle little glow boxes with greater interest or intimacy than they were the
eyes and emotions of their own familial company? Think
about it—restaurants, games, movies, malls, waiting rooms, road trips—all places
where wonderful, informal conversations used to happen because the people only
really had one another to talk to. Now
virtually everyone travels with their electronic entourage and multi-tasks
their way into shallow waters with the real people that matter most to them in
life. We all know this somewhere, deep
in our collective consciousness—but what are we going to do about it? What will be the product of this digital
revolution…how will it all end? And in
the meantime, the state of American education continues to decline—much to the
chagrin of the parents, teachers, administrators, and the society of community
that raised them: But how can we blame
the children for following the trail we have blazed for them? I predict something like the old 80’s public
service announcement where the father harangues the child until he tells him
how he learned to smoke marijuana and finally the boy bleats out the same
response we deserve: I learned it by
watching you.
Damn it, they’re good kids—the next time adults feel
inclined to point their fingers at one of them in judgment, they should take a
look at the ones pointed back at themselves…you
know, the ones probably holding their phones. I’m pretty sure that Alexander Graham Bell
probably did not foresee this over a century ago—but I’m also pretty sure that
half of the Americans reading this couldn’t tell me what, exactly, Alexander Graham Bell has to do with this matter (at least, not without first checking Wikipedia
on their mobiles for the answer).
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