Education in Light of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

Three weeks ago I wrote about the isolation of technology.  Previous to that I posted my skepticism concerning technology’s role in education.  In both cases I would have liked to have written a better researched paper on the scientifically proven effects of technology on the brain, but the demands of a weekly blog make deep research a lot more difficult.  Still, I planned on examining a number of books, including Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle, You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier and The Shallows by Nicholas Carr.  Since The Shallows found its way to the library hold shelf first, that is the first one I’ve read. It was fascinating.

Because Mr. Carr does a much finer job of making “my arguments” than I could, I will just do a quick summation of the book and encourage you to pick up a copy for yourself. 

The author’s main thesis is this:

The Internet is causing the human brain to lose its ability for deep,linear thought (i.e. reason and logic), creativity, sustained concentration, and long term memory while it increases our ability to multitask and operate on very superficial levels more quickly.

I will break down the thesis in bullet points below, and invite you to consider the consequences of increasing the use of technology in education and particularly in home education where we parents have complete control over our children’s learning environments.

• Because our brains are plastic every conscious mental exercise we perform reshapes our neuralogical physiology.
• Throughout history man has used technology to facilitate his interaction with his surroundings and has consequently increased in intelligence and mental capacity over time.  Starting with representative symbols and growing through the development of written language, number concepts, cartology, time measurement, the invention of the codex (bound books), the printing press, and up to the emergence of electronic media, the human brain has altered itself in response to the varying demands made on it.
• Nicholas Carr cites many interesting studies that demonstrate how stimulation of particular areas of the brain promote both the creation of new synapses and synaptic ports and the strengthening of existing synapses through a series of chemical processes.
• Some of the neural changes have reportedly occurred in a matter of weeks, and in some occasions, hours.
• The studies also reveal a diminished function in areas of the brain that are not exercised.
• Throughout our lives our brains change and adapt based on the needs of the organism (us) as manifested by the activities in which we engage.
• In response to web browsing and searching, where linear thought is replaced with rapid identifying, sorting and cataloguing, the brain is developing in the area of negotiating distraction, and diminishing in the areas of learning, deep thinking and long term memory.
• Further studies suggest that the overstimulation of multimedia – especially online where multiple tasks are performed simultaneously - prevents our brains from processing information effectively, and results in diminished function.
• The development of long term memory increases our intelligence.  Long term memory results from the processing of short term or working memory by the hippocampus, a small centrally located section of the brain.  The capacity for storing long term memory is unlimited.  By allowing the web to retain data in place of our own active memory, we transfer less data into the long term memory and consequently starve our brain…reducing our ability to learn and to know. 
• Renowned thinkers, university professors, scientists and other influential members of our society are promoting the web as a replacement for reading, and are celebrating extensive use of the Internet as a way of freeing our minds for more important tasks than memorizing, unaware of its deleterious effect to our mental acuity. 
• By limiting our use of technology and balancing it with quiet contemplation, extended linear reading, and sufficient sleep, we can benefit from technology while protecting our mental assets.

In closing I’d like to quickly mention that while is well-researched and intelligent it is also oddly personal and very readable.  In fact, I had a difficult time putting it down.  I think you will enjoy and find it enlightening.

The Shallows:
What the Internet
is doing to our brains
Buy it now, from Amazon.com

Managing Your Homeschool Schedule

by Susan A. Howard

Many times over my ten years as a home educator, I tearfully swore I would quit.  I wasn’t organized enough, I wasn’t educated enough, I wasn’t accountable enough and I was chronically exhausted.  At the very beginning of my homeschool “career” I read a horrible homeschool preparation guide that warned me of the rigors of homeschooling and my own potential inadequacies.  Consequently, I feared that I would destroy my children’s future, and the only thing that mitigated that fear was the recognition that my own education contributed less to my competence and success as an adult than the influence of my parents’ modeling.  My parents were good communicators, engaged intellectuals and avid readers whose example conditioned me to use good grammar, calculate accurately and utilize encyclopedias.  Formal schooling, at least in my case, was not the silver bullet that so many tout it to be.

But the reason for my poor self-image as a home educator was really not my education or my intelligence, but rather my time management skills.  Had I been a professional teacher or paid tutor I would have external requirements - the expectations and scheduling of a third party - to keep me accountable.  Lacking those externals, I had to somehow put together a schedule to which I would consistently adhere.  This required me to weigh everything that we did as a family in terms of its affect on our homeschool goals.  Understanding how to evaluate and incorporate a variety of interests, obligations and and chores into the homeschool environment did not come immediately or naturally.  In fact, many of the ideas I will share with you below are ideas I only wish I’d implemented, hindsight being much clearer as we all know.  Sometime we learn more from failure than success.  Managing our homeschool schedule is an art that has developed over ten years time and continues to develop as I prepare for my preschoolers to enter the homeschool experience.

One may anticipate that the most time consuming aspect of homeschooling is teaching. In fact, those new to homeschooling will soon discover that the biggest drain on the homeschool family’s schedule and budget is maintaining the household.  When a family spends the bulk of their waking hours out of the house, they impact the spaces and resources of external institutions – work places and schools.  Utilizing one’s own home as the workplace or school leaves an astonishing amount of mess that janitors clean up after for those who work outside the home.  We suddenly have more meals to prepare and clean up after, more sweeping, vacuuming, surfaces to wipe down not to mention the accumulation of books and materials in use every day! Then there is the consumption you just take for granted in other spaces – utilities, for example. It sounds almost ridiculous to mention, but it really has an impact, and the bigger the family, the bigger the impact.

So, balancing the homeschool schedule is a matter of efficiently completing household chores, school subjects, extracurricular activities and social events.  Let’s deal with the simplest tasks first: household chores.

1.  Share the burden.  Include your students as household and homeschool team members

Your children can benefit tremendously by necessarily becoming a member of the household maintenance team, and you can enjoy some much needed assistance.  Their traditionally-schooled peers spend much of their time away from home and family, and often do not learn simple life skills like preparing meals, maintaining a budget and using an ATM machine.  My parents came from a very private generation.  Consequently, I was not privy to our family’s financial position, aware of its burdens nor how my parents managed to support their family of six.  I entered adulthood a financial incompetent and suffered a great deal for my ignorance.  Had I been given the responsibility of keeping the pantry stocked within a set food budget, creating menus (a great time and money saver, by the way), paying the utility bills once a month,  or maintaining the family cars, those tasks would have been less daunting when I struck out on my own, and my parents would have had more time to attend my weekend volleyball tournaments.  By including your children in running the household and the budget you can contribute to their development as competent adults, their maturity, their work ethic and time management skills, and maintain the household simultaneously!

2.  Determine your educational and parenting goals for your children/students.

The second step in managing your homeschool schedule is to determine what your goals are for your children.  It is my belief that all children should prepare for college, regardless whether they actually attend college when the time comes.  No mentally healthy child of average intelligence is incapable of succeeding in college prep academics.  Many people would argue this point with me but I adhere to my opinion.  There are levels of academic pursuit that do require superior intellectual talent.  High school level physics doesn’t fall into that category.  But other goals of equal or greater value than academics may appeal to your family.  I, for example, want my kids to be relevant and contributing members to their community and nation.  My children should also develop good Christian morals and discipline.  Finally, I place value on my children finding the artistic and recreational pursuits through which they can fully enjoy their creative humanity:  fine arts, photography, music, performance, or competition.  You must determine those goals for your family.

3.  Evaluate which courses and activities are essential to your goals, and incorporate relevant activities into the home school curriculum.

Having identified your goals, you can then choose the school subjects that promote them, and evaluate the activities that dominate your calendar in terms of their contribution to those goals.  My homeschool schedule accommodates a college preparatory curriculum, as our priority.  After the lesson plans for those courses are entered into the schedule, I can then work in other activities.  I co-founded a local grassroots political organization to advocate for particular ideas and candidates.  Because I want my children to become good citizens, I incorporated my political endeavors into their homeschool experience.  They accompanied me to meetings, made signs for rallies and campaigned on street corners.  On one occasion our organization interviewed a local candidate to determine whether we would endorse him.  My daughter not only attended the event, but addressed the candidate with her own concerns, adding considerably to the conversation. 

In another instance, I direct the choir at my church, which provides an opportunity not only to model our responsibilities to our faith community, but also provides an opportunity for my daughter to practice her piano performance skills.  Providing liturgical music at church services is an important experience that augments my daughter’s music education, and reflects well on her high school transcripts.

4.  Limit each activity to the minimum time needed to benefit from it.

Of course, there is only so much time in the week to include extracurricular activities along with academics, chores and “down time”, regardless of how worthy the activities are.  You can either cut out those activities that do not advance your goals, or you can rotate activities seasonally.  You may have to do both.  Rather than singing in the church choir year-round, perhaps your children could join the Christmas choir.  Have your athlete choose one or two sports, rather than three or four.  A debater could engage in speech summer camp rather than competitive speech club during the school year.  If you limit your activities seasonally, everyone can have their various needs met without risking the academic schedule and your sanity.

5.  Adopt a scheduling method that works best for you: daily planner, software program or online service.

Knowing then which subjects and activities will dominate your week, your next task is to find a scheduling tool that works for you.  There is no shortage of scheduling methods: a refrigerator calendar with a simple to-do list, a paper-based homeschool day planner,  spreadsheet software and even a full service online organization and record keeping service like LessonMinder.com.  Methods are individual, and although I have my opinions on which solution is best, the most important thing is that you have a solution of some kind.  Too many homeschoolers resort to boxes of graded (and sometimes ungraded) assignments and could not report to a third party how their children are progressing until they have succeeded at some standardized test.

The beauty of an online service like LessonMinder.com is that after set up is complete, maintaining records, grading and providing convincing and professional quality documentation that will keep the doors open for your children to access higher education and financial aid, is easy and reassuring.  By simply correcting assignments and entering grades into the same online day planner that your children use to keep track of their daily assignments, you are also automatically if not unconsciously building a cumulative GPA, generating an official transcript and keeping your children on track.  Additionally aided by the curriculum suggestions, recommended book lists and homeschooling resources, a LessonMinder.com account is well worth the small monthly service fee.  But whether or not you track your students by calendar, notebook, software package or online service, have some kind of daily planner is essential.

6.  Develop a consistent routine of flexibility

Many homeschoolers – especially unschoolers – bristle at the idea of a day planner and a routine.  They believe that children need the time and flexibility to have ideas develop naturally and pursuits spontaneously engage them.  They are right.  But allowing for down time and flexibility does not necessarily conflict with maintaining a strict routine.  What some of these advocates for freedom and spontaneity do not recognize is that as creatures of habit, human beings respond well to routine, especially children.  They like the security that comes with knowing what comes next, and what is expected of them.  Predictability is as comforting as spontaneity is exciting and both comfort and excitement are positive experiences.  Besides, routine is not necessarily synonymous with rut, monotony or banality. 

There are many ways you can turn a regularly scheduled activity into a cherished and anticipated time.  A friend of mine starts every morning very early.  Her children and she are schooling by 6:00am, but if you were a fly on her wall you might not have noticed.  Before six, “Mary” gets up, makes her coffee and two cups of hot cocoa and meets her two children back in her bed.  There, the three snuggle up with their cozy beverages and warm blankets and read aloud Sophocles, or the Founders, Shakespeare or Lord of the Rings…whatever they happen to be assigned for reading.  Then they talk about what they have read and after an hour or so they go downstairs for a warm, home cooked breakfast.  They dress, do their chores, which may include cleaning out the chicken coop and feeding the horse, and then shower and change for the rest of their day.  By 8:00 in the morning they are wide awake and fully engaged.  Once a week her son takes flying lessons and will soon acquire his pilot’s license, and every Saturday her daughter rehearses with the Seattle Youth Symphony.  A routine like that can hardly be considered a rut.

But acknowledging the importance of flexibility, how would one schedule unscheduled time?  One year, I experimented with the four day work week idea.  We only schooled Monday through Thursday.  Friday – all day – belonged to my kids.  No chores, no required school work, no obligations of any kind.  Just as often as not, my children chose to use the day to lighten their workload on school days.  They slacked off a bit during the week and made it up on Friday.  That was fine with me because they had made their own decision about it, and that was partially the point – giving them some reasonable control over their own scheduling.  My friend, mentioned above, reserved mornings for chores and school work, and left afternoons free for her children to disappear into the backyard fort, into a good book, or whatever else interested them.  Then evening scheduling kicked in once again with ballet, boy scouts and Tai Kwon Do.

7.  Experiment and Enjoy the Adventure!

Every homeschool environment is unique.  It is one of the things that makes home schooling the best educational option for all children.  The education is personalized, targeted and one-on-one.  There is no one solution that works.  Experiment.  Be creative.  Don’t worry about trying new things, and changing course.  You have to find the way that suits your family and your children.  So rather than worry about your own lack of discipline and the chore of scheduling, engage the task as an adventure of discovery.  That’s what this journey is all about!

Image: Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Homeschooling Mantras: Part 2 of 5

Overstatement #1:  "The home school should not be school at home!"

I dabbled in homeschooling a bit when my children were very young, the two eldest being in second grade and kindergarten.  It wasn’t anything like traditional school.  We gardened, dissected plants, collected bugs and frogs, played phonics and math games, read aloud curled up in blankies and followed along with a Bob Ross style PBS drawing program as our art lessons.  But that was preschool, really.  In Washington, children younger than 8 are not legally required to attend school, and my children were already above grade levels for reading and math.  Once they began private Christian school, I naturally expected them to perform to specific standards, which they mostly did.

Then came an educational crisis having to do with the incompetence of my children’s school staff, and I was convicted to pull my two eldest out of school entirely.  I had already tried public schools, and was never impressed with my own public education growing up.  My parochial high school was a mixed bag of good and bad experiences, as I expect most traditional school environments are.  But the crisis I faced was not something I could work with – a staff of teachers who simply refused to communicate directly to me that one of my children - an "A" student was suddenly failing. They expected my child to do that for them.  They sent notes home with my daughter and actually expected her to give them to me.  When they did not hear back from me, they neglected to follow up.  Now, this does not excuse my daughter from avoiding to tell me she was having trouble in school.  But her teachers were responsible for following up.  When I suggested that they should have done so, they replied that they simply didn’t have to time to follow up with all the students with whom they had difficulties.  Really?  There was obviously something more wrong with this school than my individual complaints.  So, I took a very blind leap of faith.

In the middle of my daughter’s seventh grade year I made a split-second decision to pull both my children out of that school and bring them back home, and found myself panicked over what to do next.  I hadn’t had the opportunity to prepare.  All the typical fears homeschooling parents grapple with were compounded by the sudden circumstances.  I did not have time to research the best homeschooling methods, curricula, support options, etc.  So, I looked back on my own education, copying what I remembered as good and modifying what I remembered was not so good. 

I created a school space in my home with desks and materials, posters and equipment.  I bought shelves on which I started to stock curricula, how-to books, workbooks and reference materials.  And, having fond memories of that back to school shopping spree, I took the kids to Staples and stocked up on new pencils, erasers, compasses and whimsically designed Peachie folders.  Then we started drilling grammar, practicing handwriting, memorizing poetry, completing math problems and writing essays.  I was recreating school at home.  I didn’t know that such a thing would be wrong until one homeschooler told me it was. 

After awhile I started to notice the same criticism popping up in books and articles, web sites and home school conference presentations.  I don’t remember ever hearing a good reason for why I should abandon my little schoolhouse-at-home.  It was said that the traditional school environment would stunt creativity and self-motivation.  It would take the joy out of learning.  But I wonder now if the objection to the schoolhouse environment is more a matter of fashion.  Some homeschoolers and especially unschoolers see themselves as the anti-school crowd.  It is just not “good form” to set up your anti-school homeschool to look and operate as a school.  Ok, I get that.  And if the messages people derived from my behavior as a homeschooling mom were more important than my children’s education I would consider their criticism.  But I do not believe that the data supports the idea that the traditional school model – a desk, a textbook and a teacher – stunts creativity and self motivation. 

It is not the method of schooling that is failing our children, but rather a complex combination of social, cultural and political perspectives that use the method to teach an agenda inconsistent with real learning.  The problem is not as simple as the manner in which data is communicated to and retained by students.  There are so many things wrong with traditional education today that it is difficult to enumerate them.  I’ll list just a few.  There are more.  In general, today’s classroom is plagued with:

• Centralized political influence tied to federal dollars that make demands unsuited to the conditions of individual school districts.
• Inaccurate textbooks written by unqualified editors who are not specialists in the subject that the content covers.
• Good teachers who are restricted in how they can present material and discipline their classrooms.

• Bad teachers who are protected from any corrective discipline.
• Students who routinely manipulate a culture of adults – parents and educators alike – who are afraid to demand, require, expect, judge, punish and even often times reward.
• The distraction and competition of technology and entertainment
• Highly diverse student populations
• Political considerations – pressure from special interests and the federal government

We could spend many words analyzing each of these problems and coming up with many others.  My point is simply this:  requiring your student to sit at a desk for an hour, read from a textbook, or practice math on a chalkboard does not spoil his educational experience, nor diminish the effectiveness of homeschooling, especially when such an environment is augmented with more active, physical and creative learning experiences.

Educational expert Sir Ken Robinson famously contends that governments around the world created public schooling in the 19^th century to meet the needs of the industrial revolution.  Although one could argue that the United States public school system grew organically out of the community school model, his logical assumption proves nonetheless valid.  Even so, that fact does not mean that public schools are ineffective.  The history of education in America simply denies that contention. 

My parents were born just before the baby boom generation and slightly after the WWI generation.  Their public education was superb.  Both of my parents are avid readers.  While neither is a professional speaker or writer, they both exhibit excellent written and oral communication skills.  They both have deep knowledge of history, are disciplined and reasoned thinkers, and are highly creative.  They dance and have an appreciation for classic music and high art.  They are not exceptional for their age.  They simply enjoyed an education that was not marred by political correctness, relativism, multi-culturalism and experimental educational methodology.  The example is anecdotal, I acknowledge.  But I find these characteristics consistent with many others in their generation.

Another example that the problem with education lies in content more than style is an experience I had as a junior in high school.  I attended a Catholic girls’ high school in the eighties.  It was considered an academically rigorous school into which I tested toward the bottom of the acceptable range, and my classmates were noticeably and at times annoyingly brilliant.  And yet, when given a vocabulary test that had been written in the early 60’s for eighth graders every single one of my classmates failed.  My 11^th grade English teacher was trying to demonstrate for us that standards and expectations had even by then declined dramatically, and that we should take note and demand as much of ourselves as we could.  If was a lesson that has stayed with me ever since.

Schools can work.  They just often don’t.  And I believe that is the main reason homeschooling exists and will continue to grow.  Rather than turning our back on everything that looks like traditional education, why not use what works and modify what doesn’t?