The Tattooed Teacher Tackles the Act of Thinking

The Tattooed Teacher Tackles the Act of Thinking

My days are starting to become filled with "fights" about why thinking is not a bad thing. My students this year all seem to have an aversion to it. They want me to tell them EXACTLY what to write, what to say, what to read. I've only been teaching ten years, but over those ten years, I've seen a drastic change in the way my students think (well, and even in their ability to think deeply...and their desire...).

My first three years of teaching, I had students who not only did the assigned work, but they also wanted to TALK about it! We would sit in circles and have intelligent discussions. I have watched students' abilities to have discussions dwindle since then. Can you imagine? We're having a tough time TALKING to each other?!? I've really felt it in the past three years - I'm having to "train" juniors in high school how to carry on a conversation face-to-face. We've been in school three weeks now, and I'm STILL trying to drag conversation out of my college prep juniors. It's painful. It hurts to watch them sit there, not even knowing where to start. It hurts to have to figure out how to get young adults to socialize. And I blame the Internet.

My younger sister likes to act like I'm an ancient relic. (Last week, while trying on clothes, she said, "That dress makes you look old - like you're in your mid-thirties." Well, I AM 32...) But I am part of the first generation of home Internet users. I've been in my fair share of chat rooms, I spent high school surfing the Internet for information. But I also used books. I was taught to navigate a library. I know how to use a card catalogue, and I understand the Dewey Decimal system. My students now don't even know what Dewey Decimal is! It's amazing how quickly the Internet changed our lives.

And, yes, it's made gathering information faster, but, as Nicholas Carr asks in his article, "Is Google Making us Stupid?" He states that even though "we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970's or 1980's," the quality of how we read might be in decline: "...[we] may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace." We've become a culture of skimmers - I skim over at least six blogs each day. I skim through the news. I even skim Google when doing research. (If my students don't find what they're looking for in the first two hits that Google gives them, they lament that "There's nothing about my topic!" It simply takes too long to go to the second Google page or to retry the search.)

Now, we don't have to talk face-to-face. We can text. We can email. We can use Facebook. I have my students starting blogs this week - even I am contributing to it!! And my students, by and large, are not readers. They're simply consumers of information. They don't think about it unless they are required to, and even then, I've caught students Googling answers to questions that are based on their own opinions. Even the New York Times has given in, creating a page of article abstracts! Are you kidding me, New York Times???

So where does this leave me and my students? Well, I guess my days are going to continue with me "fighting the good fight." We'll still read books, I'll still ask my students to think, and we will talk, face-to-face. Is Google making us stupid? Maybe the question should be, "Are we making ourselves stupid?"