Facebooking in Class–Symptom, not Disease

FINALLY I get to use this meme in a serious context.

I think I’m going to have a series of posts criticizing GOOD’s pathetic education section, which is currently failing even harder than my insomniac classmates are at their finals.

This is an older article, but I decided to dig it up and poke fun at it anyway.

This article suggests that having a “15-minute tech break” for each half-hour of class would help students focus because they’d do all their Facebooking in those 15 minutes and then put their phones away.

The people who propose these initiatives seemingly have a complete lack of understanding of how young people actually use technology, and for what purpose. For instance:

Rosen says his tech break concept “works amazingly.” For every half-hour of focused work, he recommends allowing a 15-minute tech break. Once a students sees that nothing is happening on Facebook or send a friend that critical text message—they’re able to refocus, he says.

That’s not the way Facebook and texting work, though. You don’t just check it and then forget about it. You like to be on it. What’s to stop people from having their phones out under their desks outside of the “tech break?”

Furthermore, I don’t see how this is even doable. This would increase class time by a whopping 50%—ludicrous when everyone, both students and teachers, are already severely overbooked. (In fact, that may be why students use their phones in class to begin with.)

In addition, like it or not, multitasking is here to stay. If students are forced to learn how to integrate technology with learning rather than strictly separating the two, they’ll be better equipped to handle modern work environments, where you’re usually required to answer phones/emails/messages while working, and so on.

Finally, I still don’t understand why people see Facebooking/texting in class as some sort of crisis of epic proportions that requires a complete restructuring of the school day. Are students actually becoming dumber? Are their grades dropping? And even if they are, might it be because of much-needed and still-lacking education reforms, and not because of Evil Technology?

I obviously haven’t done research on this (though, by the looks of it, this guy hasn’t either), but I’d guess that Facebooking and texting in class aren’t a cause of distraction–they’re a symptom. Back in the day, kids would doodle or pass notes or just stare into space. These days they text and go on Facebook. What’s the difference? Oh, right, there’s a convenient piece of Evil Technology to blame.

That, ultimately, is the argument that I believe overrules everything else I’ve just said. If the problem is–shocker–not Those Darn Kids but the fact that school is worthlessly boring, then it’s time to have a completely different dialogue. This dialogue will have to be about how to make school both educational and fun and not about how to get Those Darn Kids to do what we want them to do.

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Facebooking in Class–Symptom, not Disease
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