Tick, Tock, Tech.

Remember the good old days, when people had to walk to school and it was uphill both ways? Before the stresses of the “real world” hit you into adulthood and you could spend after-school hours rapidly typing away one-letter responses to friends over instant messages on the computer, while complaining to your mom about how you could not be any more bored than at that very moment, as the TV blared away in the background, mixing with the sounds of your vibrating cell phone, buzzing away with voicemails. Ah, those were simpler times indeed. Even though this is a scene right out of my childhood not even 6 years ago that many members of my generation would recognize, it is a scene that would not be very familiar to young tweens and teens today. The rate at which technology is advancing moves faster than the fingers of a 15-year-old texting, making it difficult for many educators to keep up. It is especially hard for those teachers who have been in the profession for decades.

Carol Imbriaco is an 8th grade “creative communications” and drama teacher at Wall Intermediate School in Wall, New Jersey. (“Creative communications” is a fancy way of saying “computer class.”) Since 1976, Ms. Imbriaco has had the pleasure, as well as the pain, of educating students in an ever-changing technological environment. The gap between old and new methods of learning is always widening to Ms. Imbriaco.
“I had to explain to the kids that an electric typewriter was something we had back in the day because we didn’t have computers,” she said. Nowadays, kids cannot imagine a day going by without turning on a computer in the classroom. “We use computers everyday in here,” said Ms. Imbriaco of her current classes. Loren Nappi, one of Ms. Imbriaco’s students, said that they use computers in class “for research [on the] Internet, Powerpoint projects, and right now, MovieMaker.”

When Ms. Imbriaco was young, the most advanced piece of technology her family owned was a black and white television set with a “plastic color thing that you could put on the screen that could give you color.” Today, according to Loren, “probably everyone in the school” has a cell phone, let alone at least one color TV in every house. Despite the abundance of cell phones though, actual phone calls are a rarity. “[I text] all the time,” Loren said. Ms. Imbriaco can hardly get her 28-year-old son to speak to her. “If I try to talk to my son on the phone, he won’t answer his cell phone. He’ll text me. I have to say call me and then he thinks it’s an emergency. He will not pick up his phone and he’s 28-years-old,” she said. “Pick up your phone! I want to talk to you.” Gone are the days even of stand-alone calculators. Smartphones and computers have them built right in and complicated graphing calculators that can double as a portable gaming system, are a common necessity amongst algebra students. Life has changed since those black and white TV days. Even just 7 years ago, when I was a freshman at Wall High School, only a few people in my class had cell phones. Now, cell phones for nearly every 8th grader is what Loren calls “addicting.”

Picking up on the changing attitudes of students towards technology, schools around the nation are going further than computers in their classrooms. Some schools are experimenting with replacing textbooks and library books with e-readers. E-readers, such as Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes and Noble’s Nook, allow for thousands of books to be viewed and stored on one handy handheld tablet. While the backs of many students are thankful for less weight in books in their backpacks, there is an opposition to such a movement. E-readers have been given the name “book killers” by many bookworm parents opposed to the infiltration of Kindles or Nooks onto their children’s bookshelves. Despite the obvious advantages of more technology in schools (research is easy, less paper used, lighter backpack loads, etc.), Ms. Imbriaco also sees its downside. “Technology is all around them but I think it’s ruined them too,” she said. “They’re so lazy. They want everything done for them. Everything.”

For example, Loren and fellow student Casey Wehrhahn explained what they would do if computers were taken away from them: “I’d have a heart attack,” said Casey. “Yeah, when you’re researching, the work is so much harder than just typing it in,” said Loren. “With computers, you can target the answers easier.” Technology has certainly made students more susceptible to laziness, but it may be a reach to say that it has “ruined them.” In fact, Seth Hewitt, the Media/TV teacher at Wall High School, argues that there is not enough use of technology in the classroom. “Technology definitely benefits the students,” he said. “I hope to see text messaging and iPods used in an effective way to engage students in the lesson[s]… I’d [also] like to see more students using personal laptops in the classroom.” Mr. Hewitt is a relatively new teacher. He has been teaching Television Production at Wall for only six years, but is using every piece of electronic equipment he can get his hands on to help his students stay interested in lessons. “A well designed lesson using technology increases the burden on the student to discover and learn, where as, someone just using power point for note distribution allows the students to sit and watch. This creates lazy students.” Ms. Imbriaco is not just worried about lazier students though. She believes that with the advent and popularity boom of the Internet, kids are growing up faster than ever before.

“They see things on TV that we didn’t have, inappropriate things on YouTube, a lot of inappropriate things on the Internet all together,” she said. “There’s too much out there. They know too much. I get shocked with some of the things that they come out with in class. Some of the things they say and some of the things that they do or some of the things they repeat... I’m just shocked by an 8th grader, or a 6th or 7th grader with the things that they say. We didn’t do that.”

On the other hand, Mr. Hewitt argued “technology allows students to be hands on in the classroom, and find their own ways to remember material.” So then the question is, how do educators find a balance between too much technology and not enough? Honestly, there is no answer. As technology advances and more gadgets find their way into the hands of younger and younger kids, teachers and parents alike must face the burden of adjusting to the new world of the Internet age.

Many embrace and incorporate today’s technologies into school projects. Casey’s older brother at Wall High School had to use Facebook for an assignment. “The teacher made him make a Facebook and use it for that project,” he said. Instead of seeing the negative aspects computers, iPods, and cell phones have on society’s youth, the positive facets should be highlighted. By highlighting the assets and teaching kids to use technology responsibly, it is possible to reverse the damage Google and YouTube has wrought upon all of us. Even Ms. Imbriaco agrees that technology cannot be entirely ignored or to put to blame for all of society’s misdemeanors. “As a parent, after 9/11, I wanted my own kids to have phones for safety,” she said. “And I thought that [schools] saying no one was allowed to have a phone, I felt that wasn’t a fair statement to have because I felt uncomfortable with that myself.”

Even the best efforts to retain kids in the “good old days” of paperback novels and cell phone free pockets will fail. It is impossible to stop the wheels of future technologies from churning on and thus, impossible to stop the involvement of lives with the advances. Ms. Imbriaco put it best: “This is so much a part of their life now. Their whole life is technology. They’re surrounded by it.”