Aidan's Cell Phone

After spending time listening to the Ted Talk of Sherry Turkle called "Connected, but alone?" and reading the article "Anti-Teaching: Confronting The Crisis Of Significance" by Michael Wesch, my initial thoughts were that there wasn't much of a connection between the two theories.  Turkle discusses how we have an entire society of people that are immersed in whatever is on their phones.  We live our lives on screens.  Wesch meanwhile questions the significance of teaching vs. learning and whether students in college consider anything taught in a huge lecture hall important to actually learn.

As I thought about it more, I started to understand how these two pieces were interconnected.  My youngest son Aidan is thirteen years old.  He suffers from ADHD with some anxiety and depression thrown in.  We knew there was something different with the way his brain process things from a very young age, but we weren't able to get a true diagnosis (he was always too young) until a few years ago.  Medication helps with some of it, but Aidan is ultimately one of those kids whose brain does not shut off until about thirty minutes after the melatonin gummies kick in.  

Aidan is always connected...to his phone.  I have to set time limits and periodically lock his phone to get him to engage in interactions with other human beings.  He puts in his headphones and stares down at his phone.  Many times, I have to scream to get him to hear anything because the volume is too loud for me, but just right for him to keep focused and turn off the outside world.  I asked him the other day, "What do you watch on your phone?"  He responded by explaining that he watched videos about sport debates as to who is the greatest of all time and content about people creating challenges to raise money for charity (one creator has raised over $500,000 for the World Central Kitchen).  

Turkle believes we need to get our heads out of our screens and use our time to make true connections to people.  She believes in the world of social media that "I share, therefore I am."  We have gotten to a point where, "we expect more from technology and less from each other."  She explains that, "if we don't teach our children how to be alone they are only going to know how to be lonely."  

Wesch talks about the struggle of students being concerned about what they need to know for a test and how long the paper needs to be.  He explains that "teaching" in the sense that it is used in large lecture halls, with hundreds of students, etc. is not the true goal.  The true goal of teaching is getting to learning and we can only do it if we understand the significance.  Wesch flipped his lecture hall around and created a new philosophy for himself "using a hacked mix of online social media like wikis, Twitter, Jott, and Facebook to turn their (students) cell phones and laptops into a local learning network."  He created a classroom in which students spent their time becoming experts on an aspect of a part of the world.  Their assignment was simple (but not)...figure out how the world works.

The differing viewpoints of Turkle and Wesch are not as different as they may seem.  Ultimately, both of them believe that connections take place when there is something of significance to connect about.  Turkle thinks that the connections need to be made away from a screen and Wesch believes that the "screen" can be a tool to find significance.

Do I want Aidan to get his head out of his phone and talk to me about his day?  Absolutely.  Does it drive me crazy when I have to scream to give him directions because the volume is too loud?  Absolutely.  Do I now understand that his phone is being used to find some sort of significance in this world that we live in?  Absolutely.