RSS Feed
Print Story
E-mail Story
Schultz column: Saving teens, one unplugged iPod at a time
| Friday, May 18 2007 8:50 PM
Last Updated: Monday, May 21 2007 5:01 PM
It has taken since last August, but my high school students now know what to do when they hear this word: "Unplug." I say this when someone has come into class, and he or she has forgotten to take the iPod earbuds out of his or her ears. Even if the iPod is turned off, I still don't want that wire snaking out of the ears and down into the shirt or the pocket. My students seem to think that they can be attentive to the world around them if one earbud, with the volume turned down low, is nestled in one ear, and the other ear is tuned to real time. Unfortunately, when it comes to paying attention in English class, there is no contest. Music wins every time. Hence one of the classroom rules: "Unplug."
BAKERSFIELD.COM HOT TOPICS:
Loading Stories
Advertisement
Kids are listening to their iPods 24/7, as they say. No matter how early in the morning or how late at night, even while sound asleep in bed, their iPods are funneling music into their heads. It's as though their lives need a constant soundtrack; as though a moment without background music is a moment not fully lived. "My iPod is my life," says one of my students, in deadly earnest.
I am too old to understand this mentality. The older I get, the fonder I am of the quiet. Although I suspect my age is more of a state of mind, since my husband enthusiastically bought one of the very-first-generation iPods. He sometimes listens to his iPod in bed, which he says helps him get to sleep long after I am soundly slumbering. Now those first iPods look like enormous, laughable dinosaurs when compared to the tiny sleek latest ones, but of course my husband has upgraded. He is a techno-freak. He is married, however, to a techno-indifferent.
Our daughters all have iPods, in various cute shapes and colors, with varying capacities to hold music. They plug them into their cars and computers like magical things. When they move to a new apartment, they do not have to haul huge heavy boxes of albums, like we used to, or even smaller, more manageable collections of CDs. They actually don't have to pack their iPods at all, because they are wearing them, like earrings or a belt. Their music has become as personal as clothing.
In classrooms, iPods have become more than harmless distractions: they have become tools of cheating, much like cell phones or painstakingly tiny writing on the forearm. Apparently some clever but misguided students were downloading answers onto their iPods, and then accessing the information during tests. (Much like prison inmates who ingeniously devise illicit weapons, one wishes the creativity and problem-solving skills apparent in these enterprises were put to some nobler use for the common good.
Interestingly, I have read the counter-argument that iPods, rather than being banned in classrooms, should be required. Instead of relying on the old, perhaps irrelevant tool of memorization (after all, how much memorized high school stuff does anyone remember?), students should be learning how to take full advantage of the revolution in technology. We should teach them "critical thinking, creative decision-making and sophisticated information retrieval ... Let's teach them how to deal with the new problem of too much information," writes Mike Elgan, in an article in the magazine Computerworld. Elgan believes that the ban on iPods in high schools is proof that the current educational system "rewards the memorizers and punishes the creative thinkers."
Spoken like a true creative thinker. Or a lousy memorizer.
I do feel that the administrative powers of public schools tend to condemn whatever new trends young people are following prior to making the slightest attempt to understand them. With a little thought and patience, perhaps the adults could more easily incorporate into school life the students' passion for developing technology. If there is one thing high school students could surely use more of, it's passion. For anything.
On the other hand, I worry that all of my students (and children) will be stone deaf by the time they are 30 if they continue to blast dangerous levels of decibels directly into their ear canals. Hearing loss, after all, accumulates over one's lifetime. According to a report on National Public Radio, "Six years ago, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported noise-induced hearing loss in nearly 13 percent of Americans between 6 and 19," which translates to a number of roughly 5 million kids whose hearing may be muffled. While the researchers' conclusions are open to debate in the scientific community, they give me pause. Sometimes, when my students enter the classroom, or when one of my daughters is in the backseat, I can hear the bass line of a song through earbuds that are nowhere near my ears. If the sound is leaking out of their heads from several feet away, the volume is definitely too loud to be safe for the poor ears in which the earbuds are blasting. The ringing in the ears that people of my generation remember experiencing after live concerts, and which signifies imminent damage to the ears, is heard on a daily basis by many young iPod devotees. It would be comparable to going to a Grateful Dead concert every day.
One of my students told me that she likes being able to tune out the rest of the world through the use of her iPod, as though she floated within a protective bubble of her favorite music. I understand the attraction, but her statement made me feel uneasy. It occurred to me that maybe our teenagers really don't need any more help in shutting people out. Making them unplug every now and then may turn out to improve not only their future ability to hear, but their current connections to their fellow humans.