This year I have more technology in my room than I have ever had in fifteen years of teaching. I don’t know how I feel about it. The phrase in my district is “leverage technology.” I like this quite a lot, especially in contrast to the experience my own children are having in a different district. My children’s district decided to go one-to-one. Technology immersion, seems to be the tactic. It has been a rough transition. As a parent who has used technology mindfully, and been very deliberate about my kid’s exposure to technology, seeing my child use it all the time because he “has to for school” is unnerving. I want to spend some time analyzing these two approaches, and see what I can figure out (if anything). But this post is just background, the setting of the stage.

My early mantra around technology for my personal life and for my classroom was: technology must enhance what I’m doing not distract me from it. I’m not convinced we’ve figured out how to do this in education, as a system. I’m mostly positive a few individuals have figured this out. I’m in the process.

I want to be clear: I am not anti-technology. I coupled my English major with a computer science minor and used contractor jobs building websites to help pay off my student loans. Though I write often in a notebook, all my writing eventually is on a computer. I did resist a cell phone for years, mostly because I didn’t want something else to carry. I teach and have taught hybrid and fully online classes for years. Though, my family hasn’t owned a television in fifteen years.

I am of an age where I can remember the world pre-internet, as I’m sure many readers of this blog are, but I mention it because watching the web come into being taught me something about how I would use it. I lost friends to computers. They just became more interested in the machine and then we spent less and less time together. Nothing too serious, or out of the ordinary coming-of-age stuff, but I noticed. Then, in college, I read Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, and, being the serious minded young person I was, I thought hard about both the messages I received and the medium through which I received them.

Then I started teaching. I’ve had varying access to technology over the years, and I’ve used much of it. I’ve had a bank of computers, a smartboard, a small cache of laptops (webbooks they were called). But as the technology wore out, I did not feel a pressing need to replace it. It provided a way to do things, not necessarily a better way—as far as I could tell. Besides, a computer lab full of students, oddly silent, staring at monitors creeped me out. I only did it when it made sense—typing final drafts, et. all.

Then I had kids of my own. I’m an English teacher, and bibliophile, so I read obsessively about kids, their bodies, and their brains. I was especially curious about the impact of technology on developing brains after a party where a parent took all the infants (three or four) and placed them in front of a Baby Einstein video (I don’t recall the subject of the video, but it was a digital equivalent to getting high and watching a lava lamp). It struck me as an odd thing to do with a child, and I didn’t like the glassy gaze it made on the face of my own child. So, I found The Elephant in the Living Room. In it, two University of Washington pediatricians, Dimitri A. Christakis and Frederick J. Zimmerman, document their findings regarding the impact on early childhood development. The book struck a chord because they completed and discussed longitudinal studies over thirty years, and I was nearly thirty. They studied me and my generation. Their findings were not alarmist, but were alarming to my wife and me. The nutshell version is they recommended no TV at all before the age of three, and then to implement mindful TV usage where families watched together and discussed the program the way parents and teachers discuss books with early readers. Plus, they recommended avoiding overly flashy shows as they were disruptive to cognitive thought and encouraged an ADHD-like attention span. This left essentially three options on TV: Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, Blues Clues, and live sports.  We never got into Blues Clues because we didn’t have TV and it wasn’t available. Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood and Major League Baseball were available through streaming, and that was all any of my kids saw from the ages three to nine.

I think I am going to risk trying some reader’s patience with this post, because I’ve been wanting to write about it for some time and I have decided that the whole context matters. I think this is an important topic, and therefore plan on making a series of posts about it to avoid a deluge of words. My hope is that by serializing it, I’ve got your attention and you’ll wait with baited breath for the next round (think Dickens fans lining up on the pier waiting for the next installment of Great Expectations), but I’ll settle for internet-addled-sedated patience (or indifference, I suppose).  I really am building up towards something complex. And something we don’t want to talk about, not really. People want their technology, and giving it to kids and installing it in our educational systems confirms its importance. I’m also very concerned about coming off as high minded. I’m not. I avoided cell phones for years because I hate talking on the phone. And because I know I’m easily distracted. And because I love trees. So, when I’m around trees I want to pay attention to them and not a screen. People too. It came out of self-awareness that writing daily for many years creates. Plus, I’m neurotic. Seriously neurotic. My neurosis have neurosis, and nothing is better junk food for such a mind than the internet.

So, here are some questions I’m wrestling with and will try to unpack in future posts. How do we teach mindful use of technology to students who are already immersed in technology? How do I deal with the inherent assumptions in the previous question that imply such immersion is negative? Is such immersion negative? How do we justify putting technology in front of students all the time when research is showing it does not help much?  Or that it causes problems? Why is it most of the one-to-one preparation information for families is about safety and limiting exposure? What does it mean when the individuals at the center of the tech industry are abandoning technology? Or are raising concerns about addicted children? (Incidentally, Steve Jobs would not give his kids an iPad.) Where does the business end and education begin? What tools do we really need to learn? To really learn deeply?  What does it mean when arguably the most successful technologic educational platform uses a brick and mortar school to really figure out how technology helps kids learn? And that school is positive of one thing: it does not have the answers?

As you can see, I don’t have answers either, and I’m trying to be reasonable with your time, but I hope to explore these ideas in greater depth both from my family’s perspective, and from my classroom. More soon.