Screen Schooled: Two Veteran Teachers Expose How Technology Overuse Is Making Our Kids Dumber

by Joe Clement

One year, I had a senior who was doing poorly in many of his classes. As a county policy, he needed to pass my economics class in order to graduate. Not wanting to be the reason he didn’t get a high school diploma, I made a deal with him: if he did well on his final paper and passed his final exam, I would bump his grade up to the lowest possible, D-. Considering how low his F was, this was a generous offer. The essay was to be an analysis of the recession we were experiencing at the time. In the directions I provided him, he was to work in concepts like inflation, stagflation, unemployment, underemployment, GDP, and complementary goods, all major concepts of our course. The day came when the assignment was due. I was eager to see what he had done and hopeful that he cared enough about his education to put some effort into this assignment. But what he turned in to me was shockingly bad. It was a printout of a conversation about a 9/11 conspiracy theory in an online forum. Not only was it completely off topic and lacking any type of actual evidence, it was 100 percent plagiarized. He had simply copied a crazy person’s accusations he had found on Reddit and pasted it into a Word document.