“I don’t know what happened on that test. I studied, for like, two hours. Really.”
Maybe it’s observing my own child’s study habits in the midst of our zeitgeist-defining obsession with pocket gizmos and endlessly interconnected gadgetry. Maybe it’s the sudden and unexpected dip in student performance in my Advanced Placement classes the past few years. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s the solitary mirror of my own existence as I find myself increasingly unable to tolerate the slightest morsel of tedium when waiting for the teller at the bank or as I instinctively grab for my phone when there is a lull in, well, ANYTHING.
To teach is to occasionally hear heart-felt pleas of confusion from poorly-performing students, students who claim to have studied, students who are genuinely baffled by their own inability to achieve the desired outcome on a paper, project, or exam. And for most of my career, I met these bouts of frustration with genuine sympathy. After all, I was that frustrated student two decades ago in chemistry class, and geometry, and physics, and algebra, and, well, you see the pattern.
“Come in before school,” I counsel.
Or…“Find the smartest kid you know and ask to study with her.”
“Come in at lunch if you want,” I offer.
“Watch my YouTube videos.”
But I would be lying if I didn’t admit that nowadays these petitions of confusion elicit some serious doubt in my mind—maybe even a slight leaning back in my ergonomic desk chair and a raising of my eyebrows—about how much they really studied. Real studying, as in, sustained focus over a long period of time without simultaneously texting, watching cat videos, or taking a break to play Candy Crush.
Talk to teachers in a modern high school or college and they will likely admit that classroom teaching has become an exercise in constant vigilance. Like water on a sinking ship or money that permeates the American political process, the ubiquity—actually, the absolute tyranny—of mobile devices in the classroom has radically shifted the geometry of a modern teacher’s focus. Even when the phones are put away, a feeling of alienation pervades the persona of the classroom, a modern diaspora in which students are temporarily removed from the digital world they seem to prefer.
Left unregulated, most of my students would place their mobile devices on their desks in order to multitask during the class. Sure, they want to learn a little, but they also want to receive their notifications and ingest small titillations of digital emolument to get them through the banality of a school day. They have deliberately bifurcated their lives so they may live in two worlds at once.
But here is the problem: I want all of my students. By “all” I mean I don’t want to share them with a device, a group text, or the frivolous abyss of their online lives. I want their heart and passion. I want their mind and curiosity.
No, I don’t want a divided self. A divided self cannot absorb the central truth of what a classroom has to offer—young people should not go to school merely to temporarily memorize and regurgitate insignificant dollops of curriculum. They go to school to learn how to learn, to discover for themselves the sublime joy of finding a subject, an idea, or an activity authentically joyful beyond the veneer of grades, transcripts, and test scores. School should be the beginning of an education, not the sum of it. Great teachers want their classrooms to pop, sizzle, and jump. They want students to open cerebral doors and discover passages of possibilities heretofore unknown to them.
But this enchantment and the vigor it engenders is not possible for those who are chronically distracted by the rings, buzzes, and alarms that seduce them back towards the refuge of vacuous distraction.
Lately, there have been moments when I want to don the verbal bravado of Socrates and say, “Tell me, PLEASE, what is so damn interesting about your phone. What requires your immediate attention?” I want to shout at the top of my lungs as I jump on my desk à la John Keating, “Look up here, look at me, open your ears and forget about what’s in your pockets…”
Look up here because the classroom is where we learn to take ideas seriously. Or more to the point, this is where we learn how to absorb and reflect on serious ideas. Not everybody needs to be a Proust or a Picasso to appreciate the power of a mind that knows how to think, that knows how to learn, that can grow to understand that life and learning symbiotically enrich one another, hopefully for the duration of our entire lives.
Imagine guiding a group of tourists through the gardens of Versailles but no one actually looks at the splendor of the flowers or the artistry of the water fountains. Imagine walking the John Muir trail and instead of absorbing the constant beauty of the landscapes your fellow travelers merely look at the ground that’s beneath them. Imagine if the heavens opened for a modicum of a moment and whispered, sotto voce, that the secret of human existence is to master the only two things that matter in the realm of eternity—deep knowledge and passionate love—yet everyone around you refuses to disentangle themselves from the trivial minutiae on display in the palm of their hands and thus hear nothing at all.
This is how the modern educator is often made to feel in the midst of a culture that lionizes youthful hip-sterism while frowning on traditional vestiges of authority. We will never know what our students can achieve in the classroom or in the broader world if we cannot lovingly take their chins into our own hands and force their faces to look up—up into the real world, up into a world removed from avatars and cheery distraction without end.
It is time we take away their toys lest they remain children forever.