Thing #17

Okay...I am now going to climb up onto my soapbox. I without a doubt feel that the pace at which society has integrated technology is without a doubt causing people to read less and to some degree get "stupider." With knowledge, I feel that we have become a society of immediate gratification. Students do not want to "work" to find and integrate information. Instead, they surf the internet and get little bits and pieces from many different sites and carefully cut and paste it together to come up with a conclusion that is far too often someone else's! I am not sure that they would know how to go to a library and pour over a stack of books looking for useful information and then carefully take notes from it! Patience is no longer an option. Our students' brains are going a million miles an hour and keeping their attention while the phone is buzzing in their pockets is frustrating at best. I would love to see what would happen if we took students to the library and told them to go find information in the traditional sense. Or how about sit here and read this book in quiet for an hour with no external stimuli. I feel that they are lacking imagination. If they want to know what Meg from A Wrinkle in Time looks like, they don't see a mousy slightly plain girl in their head, they look it up on the internet!