High school teacher Frank Breslin explains how the constant distractions of our society undermine students’ ability to concentrate or even pay attention to what happens in school.
Breslin reminds me of Diana Senechal’s wonderful book “The Republic of Noise.” If you haven’t read it, you should.
Breslin writes:
“A factor over which teachers have no control and that plays an enormous role in making it hard for children to learn is the restlessness of American society itself, its lack of self-discipline, its inability to sit still, its constant dashing about, its hatred of silence, its disregard for rules, its absence of manners, its inability to engage in civilized discourse and the public’s blithe acceptance of such boorishness as a matter of course. These habits of mind infect children even before they enter school.”
The schools must struggle to capture the attention of students who are accustomed to nonstop entertainment and noise: “The classroom today is in a losing battle for the attention of noise-addicted, distraction-ridden, pumped-up poseurs and video-gamers in an America that breaks down all sense of boundaries, decorum and self-restraint. This overstimulated culture makes students virtually incapable of being receptive to the deeper substance and structures of learning, which assume inner calm, monastic silence, attention to nuance, sustained concentration, Job-like patience and endless hard work. Very few students are equal to this, while many cannot even sit still and listen.”
The legislators demand high test scores, but teachers must deal with the reality of our society:
“The essential problem teachers are up against today is a form of national schizophrenia, a radical disconnect between what the public wants of its schools and an American culture of bedlam and bluster, which does all in its power to undermine students’ ability to focus and learn.”
In effect, the public expects the schools to create the conditions of a different world, a world that is fast disappearing, in large part due to the combination of commercial avarice and public indifference. And the policymakers are all too willing to blame teachers for the disconnect.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Meanwhile, Mr. X Box, who helped create and has been enriched by the cacophony teachers must try to overcome, has been allowed to purchase education policy in the US.
The newest device, the Xbox One, represents a critical step toward the development and mass deployment of Orwell’s “telescreens.” It is always on. It watches you. It listens to you, and more important, it listens *for* you, as it is always listening for your voice (e.g., “Xbox, watch TV”), even when the television itself is off. I’m sure it will be full of bugs and missteps. But the technology is here.
Exactly…I have given up on trying to control cell phones…..The students who are passing my class are the ones who can concentrate…..
In his most recent TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson comments that he’s skeptical of the huge increase in ADD disorders: “If you sit kids down hour after hour doing low grade clerical work, you shouldn’t be surprised when they start to fidget.” While pointing out the love of distraction and the level of noise in the general culture is helpful to understand why school is challenging for many students, it’s even more important to demand that the actual content of school work be meaningful to students and relevant to their lives.
Life requires long hours of an often mundane climb to reach the summit. Teaching thousands of years of math in twelve years requires laying groundwork that may require blind faith and seemingly irrelevant exercises. Teachers should not and cannot always provide an immediate direct link to students’ lives. The phrase “when am I ever going to use this” may have as a response “soon”. Completing the square seems useless till you demonstrate the derivation of the quadratic formula. Then can we start modeling motions. But we can’t dwell there and must fall back to higher order polynomials before again introducing more relevant problems. But even then, the burden is unfairly placed on the teacher to make Descartes ideas somehow relate to who is dating whom and the latest tumblr post.
“The burden is unfairly placed on the teacher to make Descartes ideas somehow relate to who is dating whom and the latest tumblr post.”
Yep.
Thank you for stating the truth so eloquently!
if teachers do not inspire kids and their parents are absent then who’s job is it? disney? Nick jr? tumbler? facebook? it is perfectly normal for kids to have social lives that take their attention but the advent of the ipod, ipad, iphone, laptop, and permissive use of them by parents who cannot say no has made it indeed impossible for teachers to have any control for something requiring concentration. also the promotion in school and on the aformentioned tv shows and social media sites of children’s independance from their parents make authority nonexistant for most. the unintended or intended consequence of the ” guide on the side” .
I regard Sir Ken Robinson as a charlatan. He makes his money by telling people what they want to hear, not the truth. His gospel is old hat –it’s Rousseau, Dewey and the Sixties repackaged. “Liberate kids’ creativity!” Ha. As if it were that simple. Kids need structure, discipline, rich curriculum and good teachers to fill their brains with knowledge. Only once that hard part is accomplished will kids do anything that is genuinely creative and worthwhile. If Robinson were right, Summerhill and Sixties-style “free” schools would be paradises; instead they’re messes with aimless, unmannered kids skulking around bored.
Can’t do that Fred. I don’t entirely disagree but what is meaningful to kids is far different than what is meaningful to the omniscient testmakers. My evaluation depends on those test scores.
And tests themselves are often low grade clerical work.
I’m on a quest to never find out what a “TED talk” is. So far so good. I made it more than a decade without knowing what the Starbucks term for a “medium” coffee is, so I think I can keep this going for a while.
Don’t worry about it, you’re only “missing” a lot of self-satisfied techno utopianism.
As someone who has never eaten at a McDonalds, I can point to to this “interpretation” of Robinson’s talk mentioned above – it’s animated and funny. Some great possibilities for learning with the format in general.
RSA Animate Changing Education Paradigms
Has his royal highness and Tedness (Sir Ken Robinson) ever taught a third or fourth grade? At some point the kids do have to sit down and learn how to write letters and numbers, do have to sit down and practice manuscript writing and then cursive writing and learn how to write sentences and then paragraphs, etc. But obviously with kids, with their short attention spans, they can’t sit for hours at a time; there has to be variety and changes of pace and breaks from the routine and chances for creative expression. Teachers do realize this and have realized it for generations. First his TEDness makes false assumptions about what is going on in schools: “that the actual content of school work be meaningful to students and relevant to their lives.” Thanks for assuming that that is not going on in schools and that teachers are not busting their asses trying to make the actual content of school work be meaningful to students and relevant to their lives. I just love these TED “pundits” stating the obvious and patronizing and talking down to teachers as if they were blithering unaware idiots. TED represents the mother lode and load of BS supremo. TED really needs to be exposed for all its self-congratulatory and self-promotional BS.
Thanks for posting this, Diane. Frank
Very, very, very hard to do this with large class sizes.
The comments after the article are pretty vitriolic, unsurprisingly.
I am in complete agreement with the author’s point “Then there is our nation’s ingrained anti-intellectualism. Intellectuals play a minor role in American life, as opposed to their counterparts in other countries. We are embarrassed and made uneasy by their presence, not quite sure what to do with them. They rarely appear on national media, talk shows or discussion panels on public policy issues lest they introduce a dissenting view, which the powers that be might not wish to have aired.”
Thanks for the book recommendation- I’m adding ‘Republic of Noise’ to my personal summer reading pile.
Will students know how to write in cursive in the very near future? As of now,high school printing looks like chicken scratch. Conversations are becoming obsolete since students rather text each other instead of engaging in conversation. Thank you Diane and Frank.
*NO* EXCUSES!!!
It is not just students who have short attention spans. Adults have a major problem with this also. This is why there is so little knowledge of subjects such as the Parent Trigger wherein almost all have never read the law much less understand it and yet they are experts. How can that be? The only way to win at this game is the tedious work of research and comparative analysis. This is grunt work and most will not do it as there is not an immediate response. If you do not do the grunt tedious work you will never know anything. Noise in the classroom is also caused by noisy air conditioners. We have air conditioners at up to 68 Db. This is so loud that students cannot hear the teacher. Many school districts are using these noisy air conditioners. Is it any wonder scores are not good? In many cases it is not the teacher it is the noisy classroom in which no one can hear any one else. We have mass data on this at LAUSD and have worked with world recognized experts in sound in rooms. Much of the problem revolves around the reverberation of the room and the time between echos and how many there are. This mixes up the sound and makes it hard to understand. Have you ever been in a large room without sound amplification and you can clearly hear anyone in the room? That is a proper acoustically controlled room. It will have bass traps and deflection panels to break up the sound reflection. Think about it.
Well, Diane, you’ve just reinforced my claim that you’re anti-technology: http://goo.gl/5UpGK
This is a pretty simplistic, “the old times were always better times” argument that you’ve passed along here. The reality, of course, is that technology is changing our lives in profound and powerful ways, both good and bad. To ignore the benefits of digital technologies – to lump them all as ‘disruptions’ and ‘distractions’ – to pretend that students don’t need regular exposure to computers in a digital world – is shortsighted, unnecessary, and harmful to schoolchildren.
It’s also quite ironic to rail against student use of the very technologies that allow you yourself to have greater visibility and impact. Students deserve opportunities to learn how to use digital tools and online environments in empowering ways too. That doesn’t occur when we feed intergenerational fearmongering, misbegotten nostalgia, and erroneous misunderstandings of how the world is and will be.
I strongly encourage you and Frank Breslin to see the work that’s being done by the DML Research Hub, Henry Jenkins’ group at USC, Edutopia, the New Tech Network, danah boyd, and many, many others that understand that empowering youth with digital technologies is an imperative, not a mistake.
The Shallows by Nicholas Carr is a trenchant discussion of the effects of technology saturation.
Scott, have you ever read Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not a Gadget”? Jaron is one of the giants of technology, and he is far more skeptical than I. And I would add (as Alan did in his comment), Nicholas Carr’s excellent book “The Shallows.” Raising questions about technology and its unintended consequences is thinking; it is not anti-technology.
Yes, I have both books. If this post was balanced – or at least asked thoughtful questions – it would be one thing. As I noted above, digital technologies come with both benefits and concerns. We all need to be asking thoughtful questions – and trying to come to thoughtful resolution – regarding the new opportunities and challenges that digital technologies present to us, both individually and institutionally.
But that’s not what this was. This was a screed that basically lumped everything into the ‘technology is evil’ and ‘youth are evil’ categories. No thoughtful questions, just a diatribe against technology and youth that isn’t rooted in data or evidence or reality, just nostalgic wishes for yesteryear.
Neither the peer-reviewed research nor the integration of digital tools into our day-to-day lives support your or Frank’s positions on technology. The fact is that digital technologies are here to stay. We must figure out how to accommodate them into what we do. But ‘tech is inherently bad’ or ‘youth these days are terrible’ arguments like this one don’t get us there.
And, again, I’ll note the extreme irony in your simultaneously being against digital technology for youth while wholeheartedly embracing it for yourself. I fail to understand why you would brag about the benefits and impacts of your blog and Twitter but deny those opportunities for our youth.
Diane, this is a little off- topic but have you seen this??
http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130524/SCHOOLS/305240328
Unbelievable. The truth about the EAA is being revealed. Guess what? Covington just came out with a declaration that the students of the EAA have made tremendous growth since the beginning of the year!!
I’m not a technophobe; I’m my college department’s fast adopter. I developed testing in Moodle, a project I’ve been perfecting over several years. I only use the tests for grammar (which I teach) and use them in unconventional ways. I allow open books and collaboration. However, I don’t use this kind of testing for literature because it’s a bad fit. Despite this, I’ve had to deal with a polarizing attitude, one that pegs me as anti-tech when I speak up about the limitations I see. The irony is that I’m far more savvy than my students, who are digital natives. It’s not wrong to be forthright about what technology can’t do: it’s necessary.
If you can’t lick’em..join’em..
I have to agree with you on this one.
Technology is not going away..
It has to be channeled in the right direction.
I have seen teachers have students get out their cell phones and text the answers to the teacher.
On a review day..Put the ear thingamagidgis in…just do your work.
Don;t do your work and the teacher takes them.
It can be a plus..it can and is exciting…but it can get out of control if not managed..
You misunderstood the author. It isn’t about technology, it is about self-discipline and restraint. I’ve been in high tech all of my career before teaching. The technoenlightrnment comes when you realize that technology does not make life easier or harder. Rather it replaces one set of problems with another. Until we can impress knowledge artificially onto the brain, it really comes down to the human- human interaction.
Watch this Ted Talk about NOISE. I don’t do well in noisy environments, and neither do our young. We have NOISE Pollution.
And here’s another one about SOUND.
Why architects need to aware of SOUND.
I cant say I totally agree with the author. I don’t see kids as being any more “hyper” than they probably were 50 years ago or 100 years ago. This is just a different time and context, with different temptations.
I am very hyper myself. When I was young, if I was tested, I’m sure I would have been labeled. I can actually relate with many of my kids.
Heck, I’m struggling to keep my head up right now after playing Modern Warfare 3 until three o’clock!
Some people (including myself) feel more comfortable in a learning environment featuring noise and action, alongside a healthy dose of Metallica.
This article is mostly word salad. I get his point, and I do think there comes a time where it will not hurt a teenager to sit down, calm down, and listen to a teacher without having to check facebook.
Originally, before I read this post, I thought this would be about the constant interruptions in a class room. Things like the telephone ringing or the campus supervisor taking kids out or the constant flow of kids being taken out for EL, Spec. Ed.,(name your own test) testing or even just kids being taken out for an IEP or SST meetings.
If any of you have had the pleasure of teaching classes loaded with IEP/SST/ or problem kids that fall between the cracks you will notice these distractions. You will notice that you have a very difficult time keeping the class (and yourself) on track when every five minutes the phone rings or someone comes to the door to take out a kid for some reason.
I have had classes that would REGULARLY get 2-5 phone calls per class and 1-2 visits from the campus supervisor ( sometimes taking 3-4 kids out) and have 2-3 kids technically here, but were absent because they were sitting in the office. So a kid who is always in trouble in other classes may not show up to mine at all but according to “attendance” records he is here. One year I had a kid that attendance records showed he was absent only 10 times during the whole semester. My records showed he was absent 22 days out of the semester.
Typically in these classes as many as 5-7 kids are not in the class for some reason every day. These classes are also very transitory in nature. Onew year I had a class of 35 ( our max) that started the tear and only 3-4 students finished the year. I had over 40+ students who transfered in and out. Some staying as long as a week or two, most, just a few months.
And some people who have NEVER taught in a classroom want to attach my pay and evaluations to student test scores? What if i had them for only four weeks? What if out of those four weeks they were absent half of the time? What about the really smart kid that I taught most of the year but now some other teacher has him? I don’t think so! That is one of the many reasons why I will not go gently into the night. I will fight. I deserve better and the kids deserve better.
Distractions come in many shapes and sizes – sometimes they wear suits.
“And some people who have NEVER taught in a classroom want to attach my pay and evaluations to student test scores? What if i had them for only four weeks?”
Many growth models are programmed to kick kids out of the data calculations, so you would not be responsible for their ‘growth’ (whatever that is).
They have to reach a certain threshold of absences before the program kicks them out.
To all who are being evaluated on these Dumb Tests.
This is what you do..
You collect the data on each student and on each class.
Tom-absent 44 of 45 days.
Saly-and 29 others-could not afford a 100 calculator to do hw
John-spent 90% of his time in detention..
The Suits-interrupted class ____ out of ___..daily.
Testing—–days out of _____.
etc etc
Now…find a lawyer..you know what is next…you will win!!
How do these issues impact the students in the class that are in class and trying to learn?
Most of the time they are “THE SUITS”
Have the kids collect the interruption data and make a giant dot plot like the one on tv with the big blue dots …
Then publish for all to see..
I used to disconnect the phone and the PA in my room. During the last five years of my career (of thirty five years) I taught in a portable classroom with no physical connection to the main school and long walk away on a cold day. Distractions were minimal. When we had security lockdown drills we would prepare to flee or fight with all the weapons a physics classroom could provide. We were so far away from school we would have a great head start in case of trouble.
(If you point out that trouble might start outside with our location, that’s what the weapons were for.)
Thank you for the plug, Diane, and thank you, Frank, for your article. I find the point about anti-intellectualism particularly apt. Yes, teachers and students are under great pressure to produce at all costs–and to know in advance exactly what they will produce.
Nothing wrong with lessons that accomplish something concrete. Those are important. But it’s at least as important to mull over a tricky passage, turn a math problem this way and that, or take in a piece of music.
Some students have great patience and aporeciation for such things; others do not. I have found that many students need to learn how to listen. They lack the practice. So, once a week, I play a short piece of music for my students. They’re supposed to listen and do nothing else. They have started to regard it as a treat. Granted, I am fortunate to have a principal who understands and supports such things. Elsewhere I might have been faulted for including something that wasn’t directly connected to the lesson’s “aim.”
This is a fantastic idea! And yes, I run the risk of being marked “proficient” and not “exceeds” if I incorporate this in my instruction because I’m not “consistently” following the mandated balanced literacy schedule. My school’s “exceeds expectations” criteria this year for the domain on “academic performance” looks like it was written by Lucy Calkins.
Frank Breslin, thank you for articulating well what I often think. I teach in a lower-middle class suburb of the Bay Area. Our kids’ brains are saturated with pollution: lurid texts, Instagram images, iPhone porn, violent games, inane games, celebrity news, a thousand wretched examples of how to live and be gleaned from movies and TV… The parents are creatures of this trashy and trashed mental ecosystem as well. I try to take the students away –to medieval Japan or Renaissance Florence. Schools are one of the only hopes for showing kids a different way; but teachers, like most Americans, are stunned and bewildered by the crap culture juggernaut –and many of them have never learned how to stand outside of it and look at it critically. They cheerlead for Apple, Disney, Twitter, et. al. Thought they preach “critical thinking” they lack the wide-reading necessary to practice it themselves. Meanwhile the issues that demand grown-up and intelligent discussion are neglected: the coral reefs die, the rainforests are replaced by dumbed-down palm oil plantations, the middle class and other endangered species disappear, and oceans of crap culture rise to flood the last promontories of sustained and deep thought. As our planet is trashed, so our minds are trashed. Perhaps if we properly tended our minds, we’d start properly tending our planet too.
I kind of despise this type of article that seeks to blame our society or students themselves for educational problems. Almost every time I read one i begin to think that maybe the reformers are right about bad teachers being everywhere. It is our responsibility as teachers to engage our students in our subjects, many of which are uninteresting and lack practical application for our students. It is time for teachers to take responsibility for the things that they can control(their classrooms) and work to create the best possible education for our kids. We cannot alter our students’ technological obsession but we can use it along with their other interests to make school meaningful for them. At least this article is better than commentaries by teachers who say their students are “animals” or worse.
No one is blaming the students. The article rather points the distractions the students must encounter and overcome. In terms of power and money, teachers are FAR out-matched by the high tech, entertainment, and advertising industries. You sound either idealistic and naive or terribly uninformed. Usually, the idealism wears off in about 6 months and then the teacher must confront and deal with reality. Ever tried to police SnapChat? How about try to have kids do something as mundane as simplify radicals in a class of 35 where they can sneak a text faster than you can blink? How do you try to teach a kid who has been humiliated on a “confessions” blog? Yes, teachers are responsible for helping kids learn. But if we ever want to continue success in education, we must quit blaming the teacher and begin holding students and parents mutually responsible.
I’ve taught 7 years in inner city public schools in Denver and went to inner city public schools in Tulsa, I’m hardly naive but I am idealistic, more so now than when I began. Search my name and you can watch me teach. I understand these things can be difficult but you can also harness these things to teach. Nothing in my career, not being punched or cussed out by students has stopped my belief in them and nothing will. I’m not into to teacher blaming but many of my colleagues and many commenters on this blog engage in student blaming or parent blaming and this totally counter-productive as it is outside of our control, you have to meet them where they are and try to make your lessons engaging enough that they will. Ed reformers use these kinds of articles to push their neo-liberal agenda by saying these are excuses and in this case they are right. If you are saying you can’t teach kids because they have iPhones then you are making an excuse for failing the kids. We need to take the higher ground in the current climate and blaming kids, families or society as a whole is not helpful, after all our side is supposed to be with the kids, right?
I teach art. You’d think kids would be interested and want to be engaged. It’s fun!! Instead, I se the same thing, no listening skills, lack of concentration for anything remotely looking like instructions. I am truly terrified for the youth these days. Without any concentration, learning can not happen. I find myself “dumbing down” my art projects because kids can’t/won’t listen to the instructions. They are talking, fooling around and looking out the window while I am teaching no matter how many times I ask them to stop talking and focus. Then they expect me to come to their table afterwards and give them the lesson privately all over again. With our over-crowded classes , it’s even worse. After teaching for 25 years, winning lots of awards with student art, I feel I can no longer go on. So sad. I totally disagree with the comment above me. I know this is not my fault.
I don’t know how to contact Mr. Breslin but I want to tell him, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Bravo for putting it out there. I have seen the future coming in the door and it is scary. When a five year old doesn’t have a remote control and can’t change the scenery on demand, it gets UGLY! Then multiply that by about 9 out of the 20 or so little people in the class. It is only going to get worse as more and more children are left to their own devices (pun intended).
I see this author as one who wants lecture classes. Lecture is one of the worst ways to teach and it disengages many people including adults. Even if one lecture is good and interesting. A person can’t just sit there through 3 or 4. School needs to be more independent and respectful of people and not so much about controlling the behavior of students to “pay attention”. Direct instruction is one of the most worthless teacher activities in town. Not interesting, not memorable.
@lellingw Click through to the original article and you will see how wrong you are. @Jesse Sandschaper Same advice. To my mind Ravitch missed the money quote: “At best, an intellectual life is viewed as eccentric, elitist, unsuited to life; at worst, as unhealthy, pernicious or even subversive. We fear its corrosive effect on the young, so its restless probing is expelled from our schools and in its place we enshrine embalmed facts and the rigor mortis of standardized testing.
Is it any surprise, then, that students’ intellectual wonder is so early extinguished? That a taste for ambiguity and paradox is so rarely encountered? That critical thinking, lip service aside, is seldom encouraged? That students become bored when unable to channel their healthy irreverence into skeptical inquiry that would bring real excitement into the classroom, transforming American schools?”