More on education

I mentioned the other day my dismay at the seeming lack of attention to detail that some students possess.

I was thinking about this more, in light of another discussion over on Ravelry about the pitfalls of giving small children iPhones or tablet computers as a diversion...the concern being that if children spend too much time in the "virtual" world, they become less good at navigating the actual world. That led into a discussion of the "digital generation" - the claim that the current crop of college students should be extra-good at finding and evaluating information on the internet, seeing as they grew up using the internet. (But in a distressingly great number of cases, the extra-good-at-finding-and-evaluating is not so. It's more like some schools or some parents went, "ooh, flashy!" and put the children in front of a computer and expected them to learn by osmosis. The so-called "digital generation" is good at texting, and some are good at playing games online, and I suspect they're good at shopping online and using applications like Facebook...but I find every semester I wind up doing mini-lessons on how to find useful scholarly information on line, and what's drek and what's not. (And in many cases, Sturgeon's Law applies pretty well)

One of the people in the discussion noted something to the effect of the fact that the web was just cranking up as she was in grad school - that she learned a lot of the skills that computers were supposed to do more, and better, and faster, and that she learned them the old-fashioned way. So that while she knows how to use a computer as a tool, she also knows when not to, or what is going on (more or less) under the surface while that tool is working.

And I fit into that category as well. I was a kid just as home computers were becoming possible. (We had one of the old TI modes - 99/4A, I think? I've talked before about how I learned some BASIC on it, and how I learned to play chess using one of the game cartridges sold for it. (There was also an excellent music application, where you could score in music or write your own. The playback was not so great by today's standards - it was basically primitive MIDI - but it was pretty amazing to me at 11.)

But I also remember my 6th grade math teacher (Mrs. Constance Bynum, and yes, I remember her name after all these years) would not let us use calculators...I remember griping about that but now I thank her. (She also would only let us use algorithmic "short cuts" if we could prove we understood how or why they worked.)

And so I learned a lot of stuff the "old fashioned" way. I still write important stuff - manuscripts of articles, research proposals, exams - out longhand on a legal pad first, and then type them, revising as I go. (And I sometimes revise papers by printing them out, and cutting them up and taping the sections back together. My brain works better being able to see the whole thing at once and manipulate it, than it does seeing it a page at a time as electrons on a screen.)

And while I'm aware that everyone learns a little differently, I wonder if we maybe aren't losing something with the big push to "go digital" for everything. I've already seen virtual lab exercises being promoted. And that makes me a little bit sad. There's something valuable about doing the wet-lab, or actually going out in the field, in experiencing the world in its messy reality, instead of having a simulation where (I am assuming) things always work out, the plant always photosynthesizes for you when you are testing its oxygen production, where it's easy to dissect tissues cleanly, and so forth.

And I also think of something I read in some book on childhood development (or something like that). The author suggested that there was value in teaching children to knit, or crochet, or build things with wood, or cook, or draw....or any number of things. Because, the author said, it gave the child a sense of "agency" in the world - that they had something they could control, something they could "make." And I think there's value in that.

And I've also read a number of studies that express concern about plonking a child down in front of a screen and going "My job parenting here is done!" Some of the people in the discussion were observing how some parents would take their child out to restaurants and then just hand them the tablet computer, and have them play or watch videos all through dinner. And while I think in some cases - like if a child is fussy and otherwise inconsolable - maybe an electronic pacifier is not such a horrible thing. But I think of when my brother and I were kids - when we'd be out at restaurants with our parents. We'd play I Spy, or my dad would ask us how many things we could think of that started with the letter "r," or we'd play simple math games, or if there was a paper placemat to turn over, we'd play hangman or tic-tac-toe on it. And while I'm sure there's a Hangman app for smartphones, the point was not so much the game, as it was the interaction. Also, I think there was a subtle lesson being taught there: "Look, you have enough resources within your brain to avoid being bored during a wait without some sort of outside stimulation." (As I remember, in my family, books were pretty much off-limits at mealtimes: you were expected to interact with everyone else). Also, they talked to us a lot. (And I remember my mother once recoiling a bit at someone doing extreme-baby-talk to their small child, and later she told me, "The childrearing books I read when I was expecting you all said NOT to use baby talk, because it slows down a child's language development." So we'd have conversations around the table and stuff.

And we learned a lot of stuff out of school. We were always encouraged to make stuff, even messy stuff...we could paint at the kitchen table, there was always either Play-Doh or that homemade flour-and-salt clay in the house. I remember getting (very mildly) in trouble for using up all my mother's cornstarch to make a non-Newtonian fluid (which is now more commonly called "gak" or "oobleck," but I learned the real name for it when I was a kid. And it was worth getting in trouble over, because it's really fun to play with.)

And I learned to sew and to knit and crochet. And my mom would let my brother and me make cookies or bake cakes (from scratch) sometimes. Or help with things like making bread or pizza or other meals. And we learned that cooking was fun, and interesting, and you could make what you wanted, and it was worth doing.

And I remember my mom showing me, after I learned basic embroidery stitches, how I could take a drawing I had made, trace it onto tracing paper, anchor that tracing paper over a piece of cotton cloth, and embroider my drawing.

Lots of stuff like that. Stuff that was comparatively cheap but fun to do. And I learned a lot of skills, some I still use in hobbies, some (like the dexterity developed from years of crocheting and embroidery and sewing) that may apply to some of my labwork.

I have to admit: in a way, I'm grateful I grew up in a less-technological age. I wonder how I'd turn out if I were a kid now - would I be a bratty, attitude-filled tween if I spent a lot of time watching tween shows on television and carrying around a smart phone? I mean, instead of the shy, bookish, sort-of-young-for-my-age kid I actually was. Would I still manage to resist the 11-year-old doldrums that some girls seem to hit? ("Reviving Ophelia" talks about this some.)

And I wonder about future students - will I have to drastically change how I teach and what I teach in order to cope with an up and coming generation who has less real-world and more virtual experience? Already I see things like students wanting to photograph with their cameras, rather than draw, specimens in lab, and I have to explain that the drawings are not valuable as drawings qua drawings; they are valuable as an exercise in taking time, looking at the detail, deciding what's important, what you need to see....in a lot of my botany classes, we had to draw things, not so we had a copy of the specimen, but to cement in our minds what the key characteristics of that species were. And I see some people not wanting to put in the time on stuff that I know it will take. People ask me: "How do you know the plants so well?" And it's like the old joke about getting to Carnegie Hall: lots of practice, man, lots of practice.

I worry that the "digital age" does everything so fast that people get conditioned to want to circumvent that, that it's harder to tolerate the idea that something might take a year or more to learn in an "instant" world.

And for that matter: a decline in feeling comfortable making things or fixing things or manipulating things - well, that could lead to an even greater crisis in the skilled trades. (Already I've read that in some cases, it's hard to find enough people who know mechanics or fabrication of parts or similar skills). That the push to make everyone a "knowledge worker" is leading to a shortage of (for lack of a better term), "stuff workers."

I don't really have any solutions. I suppose, limiting screen-time is a good one. And maybe teaching skills like fixing stuff, or building stuff, or needlework, or watercolor painting, or whatever the child expresses an interest in - and encouraging that interest over time - might help.

I know I feel happier and more balanced when I have time to cook, time to knit, enough time to practice piano in addition to my teaching duties. (And also, how happy I am doing field research, or playing around with my soil invertebrates.)

But the world has changed SO MUCH. When I started teaching college, cell phones were, if not in their infancy, still in their childhood. More people than not didn't have them. Now, so many people have smartphones that do everything (except, apparently, make clear phone calls). And while smartphones can be fantastic for some things (like, texting someone who is late for field research and telling them where you will be at the field site - or texting your spouse that you're on your way home - or letting someone know, "hey could you pick up some orange juice on your way home?"), sometimes I think they get way overused. And I think there are some people who have lost the ability to sit and entertain themselves with their own brain - or interact in a friendly neutral way with strangers.

I don't know. Sometimes I feel like we're at a crossroads where we've gone way overboard with things like texting and being online every moment of every day, and in a few years people will dial back and go, "Whoa, we were really wasting a lot of time with that texting junk!" and go back to having face to face conversations, or being "unplugged" for a while every day, or whatever - or that we could go the other direction, into an increasingly cut-off and "virtual" world.

I don't know. In many ways I love and am dependent upon the internet - I have friends that I never would have met were it not for things like Ravelry. I have a fast way of communicating with family or friends or students or co-workeres. But I also know that I can get sucked in too much, and spend a lot of time online I'd be better off spending reading or working or knitting or something. (One of the reasons why I have held off getting a smartphone is that I'm afraid it would enable me to spend too much time online. The other reason is that smartphone plans are far more expensive than my dead-basic, mainly-for-emergency-calls cell phone plan, and I don't feel like spending that money).

But I think one thing we as a society - maybe we as humans - are not good at is balance. We go too far one way, or too far another. (I know some people who have totally signed off the Internet, and who totally reject it as a waste of time or a thief of privacy). I think the challenge IS going to be to find a balance between the virtual and the real, the digital and the analog. I just hope we can.