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

by Joe Clement

Years ago, I would give my class of ninth-grade English language learners the assignment of writing a five-paragraph essay based on several pages of information they had to read and interpret. After about an hour of class time, 90 percent of the students would turn in a completed paper, despite needing extra time to translate phrases from their native language to English. Today, I give this exact same assignment to my ninth-grade honors students. Unlike my previous students, all of these digiLearners are proficient in English. Despite this, instead of an hour, I give students three class blocks amounting to four and a half hours of time to complete it. That’s just time spent in class. They are also free to work on this assignment at home. This year, when the four and a half hours were up and it was time to turn it in, 17 percent of the students hadn’t finished and 8 percent of students hadn’t even started it. These honors students chose to spend four and a half hours playing on their cell phones and take a zero on a major assignment rather than spend one minute working on it.