One of the cardinal sins of ineffective teaching? Too much
information. Too much too fast with too little time to absorb, process,
connect. 41 years of teaching under my belt and I’m still committing it!
Some of it comes from sheer excitement of sharing what you know
and love, but still, you need to notice when the kids’ eyes glaze over. Arnold
Schoenberg once said that the most important tool for a composer is an eraser
and that holds true for planning classes as well. Narrow down, focus so that
the students can later expand and connect.
So amidst a thousand worries I’ve had about the influx of i-Pads
into schools, the way in which the device is constructed to be a technology of
constant distractions is on my mind. The technologies we use are not a neutral tool, they come to
define what we consider good teaching, good learning, good knowledge. They not
only affect our intelligence and our absorption of knowledge, they also affect
the way we think about intelligence,
the way we think about transmitting knowledge. As a teacher trainer, I’m trying
to help people avoid the pitfalls of TMI and there’s a whole arsenal of
machines working against me.
I just finished an excellent book by Nicholas Carr called The
Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains and it’s not good news.
Nothing surprising for someone like me who has been thinking and talking about this
stuff for some thirty years at least. But very well put together and always
using the “we” voice—no evil bad guys trying to control our brains for
nefarious ends, just us vulnerable humans following our fascination with
machines and mathematical thinking and jumping into the electronic pool with
both feet without testing, or even wondering about, the quality of the water.
Or which part of is will swim and which will sink.
Out of many points, let’s take a moment with the TMI one. The
Internet (mostly synonymous with “the computer” these days) is a technology of
distraction. While we could technically sit for an hour or more comparing
scholarly interpretations of James Joyce’s Ulysses,
we won’t. Not only because all the links and hypertext will steer us from the
main road and keep us leaving the trail for side paths (whether they’re
relevant or not), not only because ads may pop up or a ding inform us of an
e-mail or we suddenly remembered we forgot to post on Facebook that we’re
studying James Joyce’s Ulysses or
breaking news that Trump made a statement that was actually based on a tangible
fact (“I am not in the least bit qualified to do this job!”). All this is hard
enough, the constant allure of the Sirens and then some actual photos of them
in their sexy skimpy outfits, but there’s more. It’s that our very notion of
reading and research and thinking has been redefined by the technologies we use
and left us in the shallow end of the pool.
Ever been in a classroom during silent reading time? Have you
felt the energy in the room, the brain waves of children and adults wholly
absorbed with their imaginations turned wholly on, the sense that each was on a
private journey that was forming their sense of self, their sense of longing,
their sense of belonging? Have you felt the shift when the bell rings and they
shake themselves from one form of awakeness to another?
Now compare it to the same people in the same room surfing
through their i-Pads or mobile phones, going from one sound-byte to the next,
one sensation to the next, one quick hit of information or entertainment that
leads nowhere else and comes from nowhere else (that they’re aware of). There’s TMI—too much information, too much interruption, too much idiocy. Can you feel
the difference between deep silent reading and shallow Internet surfing?
After an initial and failed flirtation with being a Luddite, I
finally came to a convincing stance that exactly no one (except people like
Nicholas Carr) is interested in hearing:
“The
right tool for the right job at the right time for the right amount of time at the
right cost with the right people at the right level of awareness of what it
adds to us and what it subtracts. “
We all know that the Internet can be a window into new worlds,
something that opens us wider and connects us (even if only through Facebook)
further, but we’re less willing to look at what it’s taking away—things like
deep reading, deep thinking, prolonged focus, attention to the world while
we’re walking, connection to the people next to us (who aren’t looking at their
phone) and more. We now have technology detox camps (expensive! and we just
used to call them “camp”) and aps that turn off our devices (ironic!).
But a good read through a thought-provoking book is a good idea
also. Check it out. And don’t wait for the Youtube graphic summary.