The Teenage Brain, Unplugged

While phrases like ‘digital fast’ and ‘digital detox’ are trending on some social media, these terms represent an idea that may be more important than a mere fad, and more relevant to teenagers than they may understand.

At various universities, neuroanatomists and psychologists have data about the effects of ‘screen time’ on the brain. This data leads to the conclusion that everyone, but especially those under the age of 25, should take occasional extended breaks from the cyberworld.

Frequent and extended interaction with computers, smartphones, tablets, and gaming devices changes both the structure and the functioning of the brain.

Given that the brain is still growing and forming until, on average, age 25, large amounts of time with Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft may truly produce a misshapen brain.

Many people under the age of 25 spend more time with interactive electronics than adults, including their parents, apprehend. The more interactive the experience, the greater the distortion it produces in the brain.

For a teenager who may spend five or more hours a day with iPhone, iPod, and iPad, 24 or 48 hours of a total ‘digital fast’ may simply be the beginning. It takes that amount of time simply to get through the first phase of withdrawals.

Various forms of brain imaging - PET scans and functional MRI - suggest that a brain heavily influenced by Twitter, Facebook, xBox, and PlayStation won’t return to healthy internal patterns until a full week of ‘digital detox’ is behind it.

Given modern lifestyles, this is difficult to do!

If you’re going to try it, true ‘wilderness’ camping is a good way to start - out of cell phone range, and no electricity of any kind.

Happily, there are less drastic alternatives. Simply reducing the total number of hours per week spent in the presence of anything electronic is healthy.

Adults and teenagers can find alternatives in the real physical world. Indoors, there are jigsaw puzzles, card games, crafts, or simply straightening up that pile of papers on your desk.

Outdoors, you can take a walk, ride a bicycle, or read a book sitting on your back porch or under a shade tree.

As long as there’s nothing plugged into an outlet, and nothing running on battery power, you’re giving your brain a break from the almost non-stop assault from digital media. Whether you’re 55 or 15, it’s a good step toward health.

Workers of the world, unplug! You have nothing to gain but your brains!

The Cost of Time

If a high school has, e.g., around 100 teachers, the cost of holding a meeting can be enormous. Of course, counting the teachers can be done in different ways: one can count actual people, or one can add up the FTE, i.e., two half-time teachers equals one FTE.

In either case, let's assume that the average take-home pay of the teachers is somewhere between $20 and $40 per hour. Remember, however, that what a teacher costs the district is more than what he or she receives. So the cost per teacher might run between $30 and $50 per hour.

A two-hour meeting, then, could have a base price of $8000, if we arbitrarily take $40 as an hourly cost. But additional costs quickly appear: additional school personnel at the meeting (secretaries, administrators, counselors), electricity and heating or air conditioning, and coffee if it is offered.

In addition, those presenting at the meeting will have spent time, and therefore money, preparing their materials. Photocopies of handouts will have a per-copy cost, and if shared electronically in an effort to reduce the amount of paper and ink used, then increased time spent sending and receiving emails, or reading through Google Docs.

Transition time into, and out of, the meeting may consume another 15 minutes on either end, adding another $2000 to the overall expense.

If one considers biweekly faculty meetings at Huron, Skyline, and Pioneer High Schools - on average, two per month - costing $10,000 each, then $180,000 is not an unreasonable estimate for the yearly cost of those gatherings.

But biweekly faculty meetings are merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Consider the Professional Development days, also known as 'inservice' or 'continuing education' days. A thousand teachers across the Ann Arbor Public Schools might spend eight hours in meetings, amounting to $320,000 for that one day, not counting the price of presenters, often paid consultants whose fees include airfare and lodging.

Add to this departmental meetings, meetings at smaller schools - elementary and middle schools - and 'icebreaker' and 'team building' sessions, and it's not beyond imagination to speculate that several million dollars per year are spent on meetings.

The question, then, to be posed is this: what do we get in return?

If millions of taxpayer dollars are spent on these conferences, can we then find measurable increases in student academic achievement resulting from these meetings? Are SAT and ACT scores going up? Or is student behavior and discipline better?

Meetings are expensive. What are we getting for our money?

[Andrew Smith is a German teacher at both Huron High School and Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor. During the 2015/2016 academic year, Andrew Smith teaches two hours of German daily at Pioneer High School and three hours daily at Huron High School, in Ann Arbor.]

Educational Data Points: Paper and Electronic

An amazing number of measurements can take place over the course of a school year in an ordinary classroom.

If we consider a high school teacher who instructs five classes per day, averaging thirty students per class, over the course of a 185-day school year, that’s 27,750 student contact hours.

If the teacher asks three questions, or answers three questions, or gives three instructions to individuals students - aside from the questions, answers, and instructions given to the entire class at once - that’d be 83,250 spoken interactions.

Let’s imagine that homework is assigned on 150 of the 185 instructional days. This would yield 22,500 pieces of work. Before the advent of the paperless work, that meant 22,500 pieces of paper.

Even with paperless assignments, it’s still 22,500 data points, which usually translates into keystrokes, data entry, and spreadsheets.

Beyond homework, there are in-class assignments and worksheets, quizzes, tests, and other forms of practice and assessment. If a teacher gives two small quizzes per week, assuming a 36-week academic year, that’s 10,800 quizzes to be graded, and 10,800 scores for keystrokes and data entry.

The number of data points is quite large, both relatively and absolutely. These quantities point to a need to create and maintain efficient data systems, and to free a teacher’s time up for grading assignments and record-keeping.

Teachers have an significant responsibility for data management, and require time to do it well. This fact needs to be weighed in considerations of how much time teachers are required to spend on other duties.

Physical Fitness Supports Academic Achievement

Japanese schools have received a lot of disparagement, and from many different perspectives. They are often accused of stifling creativity and over-emphasizing rote learning.

Whether or not these criticisms are merited, others may decide.

Praiseworthy, however, is a practice maintained in at least some Japanese schools: daily physical exercise, usually at the beginning of the school day.

While many American high schools have extensive sports programs, they differ from physical fitness programs in at least two ways.

First, high school athletics do not involve all students. Percentages vary, but at many North American high schools, roughly half of the student body may participate in a school team. Because the sports are seasonal, at any one point during the school year, a smaller segment of the students is engaged in athletic activity.

Second, time spent at sports practice does not always equal time spent in physical exercise. There are long speeches from coaches about strategy and morale, and there is time spent waiting in line to do a certain drill or get to a certain exercise machine.

By contrast, a school-wide exercise program might involve twenty or thirty minutes of calisthenics before the first class of the day - pushups, sit-ups, running, pull-ups, chin-ups, etc.

Administrators can consult athletic trainers, physical therapists, kinesiologists and exercise physiologists to design such a program, and individual students with medical conditions may need alternative programs.

Such programs will be more balanced, in some cases, than team practices for specific sports: addressing more and varied muscle groups, alternating between sudden exertion and endurance, balancing concentric with eccentric and isometric muscle contractions, balancing muscle strengthening with cardiovascular concerns.

The benefits to students are many - increased circulation, steadier metabolism, more alertness early in the morning, less drowsiness later in the day, longer ability for sustained mental focus, etc., all of which lead to better academics.

The Inefficiency of Stopping and Starting

The tradition of a long summer vacation is deeply rooted in American culture. Discussions about year-long schooling have been circulating for decades, but to little effect.

Whether or not one embraces year-round schooling, the fact that schools come to a complete stop in May or June and are resuscitated in August or September leads undeniably to serious inefficiencies. Visiting a typical public school in the middle of July is like touring the set of a "zombie apocalypse" movie being filmed in Hollywood.

Short of year-long schooling, schools could be kept running during the summer months to maintain some sense of institutional momentum. Teachers could use that time to prepare for the coming academic year, update records, and engage in 'professional development' and in-service continuing education.

Currently, the last one or two weeks of the school year are ineffective as a great deal of effort goes into ending the year; the first one or two weeks are ineffective as time and energy are spent jumpstarting the school year. From a perspective of industrial efficiency, shutting the institution down so thoroughly makes little sense.

In any case, however, elementary and secondary pupils in the United States do not need more total minutes or hours of time in school. The optimal configuration would be to shorten the school day and lengthen the school year.

A survey of the global trends shows that from the huge amount of school time (long days and long academic years) in some east Asian countries, to the relatively short school days in some central European countries, there is no direct correlation between amount of time spent in school and academic achievement.

There is, however, an negative impact on the individual student which increases with the amount of time spent in an institutional setting. To foster the twin necessary preconditions for civilization, the recognition of the individual and the value of liberty, school age children should spend time outside of institutions.

To foster the humanistic behaviors which we would like to see in society - altruism, honesty, justice, etc. - a child likewise is best directed to home and family, which are the source of such values. Is it any wonder that the problem of 'bullying' has become a popular topic of discussion, after our society has consigned children to ever longer hours of being warehoused in some institution?

To be sure, family environments are not perfect, and some can be dysfunctional and even dangerous. But they do have at least the possibility of providing a positive environment for children. By contrast, many public schools are configured in way which, while providing tolerable to good to even excellent academic education, cannot offer character formation which includes the humanistic virtues which we might like to see.

Indeed, despite their best efforts, they cannot offer them; even more, because of their best efforts, they cannot offer them. Because they are government institutions, they are a priori destined to fail.

As seeming counter-evidence, we see teachers who are truly beneficial to their students, and students who truly acquire these very virtues and character traits. How then, in the face of such counter-evidence, do we know that the schools are incapable of bestowing desirable socialization to students? Because these counter-examples are brought about, not because of the schools, but rather despite the schools, by teachers who exemplify the literal meaning of the word 'subversive.'

A teacher who manages to impart some such salutary experience to students is doing so in an effort to undermine the system.

The chimera of a school-imparted socialization arises from the notion that methodologies and the scribblings of educational 'experts' are of value. Universities across the land have schools of education, in which writings and lectures are produced, giving the impression that education is a science and that these experts can calmly direct the professional activities of teachers. As Mortimer Smith writes:

Can our own age be said to exhibit distinctive points of view, habits of thought, or philosophical attitudes to a degree great enough to constitute a "spirit of the times"? I am not prepared to make any sweeping generalizations about the matter, but it does seem to me that there are two rather obvious tendencies present in our contemporary world which make our own times somewhat unique. We live in a period when the concept of the importance of the individual has been largely replaced by the concept of the social, and when it is widely believed that all personal and social problems can be resolved by use of the scientific method. These two tendencies are in evidence in much current thinking and especially in our thinking about educational matters.

Because the social sciences are largely not sciences, and because the 'spirit of the times' allows institutional whims to overrule personal sovereignty, the educational system is ripe for hijacking.

The system is regularly hijacked by those with political and social agendas, by those who allege that they're acting the in best interests of students, yet who have no concern for student achievement. The system is hijacked by those who proclaim that they'll socialize students, and thereby claim the right to formulate 'affective goals', which is to say that the institution can and should shape what and how the students think and believe.

In a society founded on freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of thought, and the right 'peaceably to assemble' in free association, the notion that the school should shape the non-academic aspects of children's lives is perplexing.

The notion of 'socialization' in school is a challenge to a free society.

For this reason, while it is good to extend the operational calendar of the schools by maintaining more staff in the summer - in practical terms, teachers working in their offices and classrooms during the summer - there is no need to increase the total number of hours and minutes children spend in school. Indeed, children might be best served by reducing that time.

The Competing Purposes of Education

The question is rarely asked, and even less often answered, why do we send our children to school?

As we know, other aspects of education are endlessly analyzed and debated. But what is the purpose of education?

Of course, there are many answers being given. They are, however, usually implied rather than explicitly stated: perhaps people give these answers without even realizing that they are giving them.

Clearly stated, or more often merely implicit, these goals are offered: education should make students effective and able participants in a democratic system; education should be job training; secondary education should be focused on preparing students for college or university; education should develop ethical or moral thinking; education should teach life skills like nutrition and hygiene; etc. The list is diverse and endless.

With such a large and divergent set of potential goals, the construction of a coherent educational system is unlikely.

This is entailed by the nature of public education. Private education has the luxury of clearly articulating some goals, which by implication excludes other goals.

Bernard Iddings Bell, discussing a monograph about education by Mortimer Smith, writes:

Mr. Smith ends this admirable essay with a question. "We have been going on," he says, "for some time on the theory that education consists simply of experience and change and 'growth’ … Perhaps we need to set up some ends for education; perhaps we need to ask "growth for what?" He knows, of course, that there is no "perhaps" about it. Our professors of education, our administrators, our school boards, teachers whom they train and employ, avoid inquiry about purpose as they would avoid the plague - purpose in life, in labor, in thought, in love, in citizenship, in anything, even in education itself. Why? Because to ask about the “why” of things is both personally disturbing and disruptive of whatever static social patterns happen to be. To ask “why” might result in teachers remaining human beings and children becoming human beings, both given to making embarrassing inquiries instead of being content to be placid tools for production and consumption of goods, complacent believers in whatever those who happen to wield social control tell them is the truth. Men who ask “why” are necessary, to be sure, for the survival of freedom and democracy. But who nowadays wishes a free state at the price of possible discomfort? Who for democracy is willing to run the risk of questioning closely those flattering demagogues who pleasingly blarney the electorate and who give much in bread and circuses? Certainly not the rank and file of hard-headed Americans.

The desire for moral and ethical thought as a goal in the educational system has repeatedly found new homes, moving back and forth between the Left and the Right, between the social liberals and the social conservatives.

Each has items which it wants declared ‘good’ or ‘evil’ - whether it’s tobacco or condoms, whether it’s tolerance of specific sexual practices or tolerance of free market enterprise, whether it’s the inclusion or exclusion of spiritual thought in public discourse, etc.

While they view each other as opposites, they have this in common: at some level, their goals for education obtain a moral hue.

Mortimer Smith indicates those both sides find themselves perpetually disappointed:

Under the guidance of “the scientific spirit” modern education cannot but fail to give young people a knowledge of good and evil, for to the social scientist these are relative terms. The student is taught to believe that goodness is what “works out” something that brings “beneficent fruits in social and personal life,” without defining any standard of beneficence; “standards” and “values” are to the modern educator prescientific, theological terms. It is precisely this attitude that produces in the student that sinister lack of individual moral freedom which Lafcadio Hearn declared was the result of Japanese education, which, as he pointed out, has always been an education based on social cohesion. By fostering this attitude in the student he will never know whether we're right and Hitler wrong; he will never develop any value-system by which to judge the intrinsic worth of anything. At best this kind of education will produce only clever, wary animals who have learned how to keep out of trouble.

Smith’s discovery is that, while the charge of ‘relativism’ is often perceived to be a charge leveled by the Right against the Left, it is in fact an accusation which the Left, in its own way, also makes against the Right.

As long as the electorate has significant influence on educational policy - as long as those who oversee education, whether they be local school boards or state legislatures - are directly elected, the question of the goals and objectives of public education will remain an unsettled one.

[Andrew Smith is a German teacher at Huron High School and at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. These writings constitute a mere exercise and are not to be taken as a definitive statement of his views.]

The School's Role as One of Many Formative Institutions in Society

While attending to the challenges of secondary education, readers often routinely consider students, teachers, parents, administrators both at building and regional levels, unions, elected school boards, and federal bureaucrats.

One often overlooked party is the faculty of the colleges and universities who prepare teachers: those whose task it is to teach the teachers to teach.

About this “pedagogical elite” or “academic hierarchy”, Bernard Iddings Bell writes:

They are too absorbed in teaching the teachers how to deal not with human beings but with creatures such as by nature ought not to exist, never could exist were it not for black magic; devoted to a more than dubious educational philosophy; pleased as Punch with themselves and unable to see how anyone in his right mind can jest at what they say.

Writing about an author who might venture to point out that some faculty, tasked with teacher preparation, are at best irrelevant and a waste of resources, and at worst actively diminish secondary education, Bell argues that such an author’s

thoughtful complaints will be welcomed by many who are intelligent laymen in respect to “education,” people like himself; by many percipient parents aghast at what the schools have done or are doing to their boys and girls; by many who, intent on promoting sound government and decent craftsmanship of thought and action, must take the products of our schools and colleges and try to make something of them and by them in terms of adultness.

One such author, evaluating teacher preparation programs, notes that one gap in the thinking of such syllabi is the failure to recognize that the broader definition of ‘education,’ in the sense of ‘formation,’ is wider than mere schooling. Mortimer Smith writes:

We are all apt to make the mistake of thinking of education only in its formalized aspect. If you were playing one of those parlor games that educators call “objective tests” and were given the word education and asked to write opposite it the first associated thing that came into your mind, wouldn’t you be apt to write school? We instinctively think of education as something we get from organized courses in a formal institution. Because of a persistent confusion in modern educational theory it is imperative that we emphasize the obvious truth that as education is the whole process of adapting the individual to the environment, the school can only be one factor in that process, not necessarily even the most important one.

Certainly, school is often the primary provider of “education” in the narrow sense: Where does one learn the quadratic formula? Where does one learn to conjugate a German verb? Where does one learn about the political intrigues surrounding the family of Henry II? Where does one encounter Shakespeare’s Tempest?

But school is only one provider among many of “education” in the broad sense: of “formation.” Usually, families are the primary locus of formation. In addition, there are clubs, neighborhoods, friends, religious institutions, the media, and many other social encounters which are apart from schooling.

It is folly, therefore, for schools to ignore, or deemphasize, their primary task of delivering education in the narrow sense. It is further folly if they assume that they are the primary or exclusive deliverers of education in the broader sense of formation.

[Andrew Smith is a German teacher at Huron High School and at Pioneer High School.]