An "Entertainment-Oriented, Mass-Communication Culture"

[Denali Doug]

While reading a text I'm using to help form my unit plan, I stumbled on this citation: "The issue [of motives for learning] is particularly relevant in an entertainment-oriented, mass-communication culture where passivity and 'spectatorship' are dangers...active learning is the antithesis of the spectator's passivity....How, within this context, do we arouse the child's interest in the world of ideas?" Here's the fun part -- the author was a guy named Jerome Bruner (I'd not heard the name before reading the passage), and he put those words to paper in 1960! The Albuquerque Journal ran a banner headline a week or two ago that said students are dropping out because they're "bored." The implication was, clearly, that the dropout problem may well be be fundamentally related to a failure of teachers to engage their students, meaningfully. Our state Secretary of Education weighed in, saying "that's the feedback we're getting." She went on to assert the need for a "more rigorous curriculum." My fear, of course, is that a more rigorous curriculum means about two-thirds of my English I students would be posting a failing grade, rather than the one-third to two-fifths I've got right now. My personal belief is that these kids very much feel entitled to take an ala-carte approach to class participation and assignments. I've attributed much of that to an "entertainment-oriented, mass-communication culture" that, if it is not relatively new, is at least a quantum leap beyond anything which preceded it. Was I way off on this thinking? Are social distractions stronger now than they have been before, or am I just seeing a semi-permanent condition from, as an intern, a new perspective?

[MichaelSanchez]

TIME Magazine's cover story this week was about the "plugged-in" nature of today's kids, asking if it was too much. Speaking as the young kid of the intern group, I just have to wonder how much of this concern over the distractions that kids have to face today is simple befuddlement on the part of the older "establishment" teachers. (you'd be shocked to know how many teachers of mine, in high school, rejected internet sourcing.)

i think, doug, what i'm tryin to say is that, yeah, kids are definitely at-risk now because of how much distractions they've got. however, i don't think it's any worse than what's gone on before... maybe just occurring a little faster. which, you know, is inevitable when we've got the booms in tech that are happening now.

maybe i haven't answered your question... here's what i think: the article in the journal seems way off-base. if rigourous standards are what we need more of, those classes with hard teachers would be filling up - not the classes where the teacher lets the kids do whatever they want. it's simply backwards.

[RickRed]

Hey guys,

Actually, Michael, I think that it is less about being freaked out about the technology and more about seeing real changes in attention spans. My observations of my students have led me to conclude that the real difficulty that they have with reading is that it taktes too long. They simply aren't wired to pay attention to anything longer than your typical between commercial segment in a TV show.

My belief is that as a society we have become so used to instant gratification that we have already entered the "Brave New World" of feelies and soma. More rigorous standards won't fix the underlying problem of societal laziness.

[MichaelSanchez]

I'm interested in this line of thought, but maybe for different reasons.

Maybe it's because I've had a computer in my home and in the classroom for as long as I've encountered such possibilities or maybe it's because I've embraced that very technology, but I've always had a problem with this argument, that our attention spans are shrinking.

I definitely think that it's true that it's harder to get through to people nowadays... I'm just not sure that we're actually losing our attention span.

That being said, I don't know how to reconcile the two above paragraphs. So maybe I'll have to concede defeat this round, Redington!

[Carlos C]

Dave and I have been discussing the use of film as a methodology for history (I hope this comment fits into the current discussion). We would think that putting history on to a T.V. screen might aid student engagment or at least hope that they might just watch anything as long as it is in a medium they are interested in.

However, after looking into documentary films on slavery I was stunned at the fact that even I fell asleep watching them (not in the classroom). How could I attempt to pass of something to my students that put me to sleep. Well, I didn't. Instead I continued my search and found "Slavery and the Making of America" These documentaries held most of my students attention, and those who thought it was boring i ridiculed as being pretty incensitive to the issue of slavery.

My point, Students will not watch hours of A Ken Burns Documentary("White Men Behaving Badly" article), just because it is on the television. We even play films on a large screen projector to make the movie aspect larger.

So, if students wont read about a topic, and not all of them will follow a documentary what do we do. I am finding that many students just hate the idea of being taught. However, I think this is just a lie that some of them have come to belive. When we do pre-assesment asking questions like "Do you think learning about the 3 branches of government is important and why or why not? Most kids write down answers that astonished me.

Nevertheless, the question remains. These kids want to be entertained and most methods i have used do not fit their requirments of entertainment.

[whitearw]

Once again I weigh in late on the subject. I'm with Mike on this one; I don't think that exposure to mass media inherently reduces attention span. To the contrary, in some cases; ever seen a kid sit in front of a computer for hours on end? Spend an entire spring break trying to perfect one level of a video game? Anyway, I feel that mass communication doesn't turn down the attention span, it just makes for more finicky information consumers. We have learned, in our newly info-drenched environment, to winnow off the large volumes of information that we feel are of no use to us. Google practically anything, and you get around a quarter million hits; but we all know in less than the 0.14 seconds the search took which hits are actually of consequence to us. Kids are simply adapting to the environment around them, nothing more. In many cases, this mechanism works against us, as we try to bring knowledge to our students in a way that is so antiquated as to become irrelevant. With most subjects, it's as though we're trying to teach Driver's Ed on a Model T. Using television brings us in to the last fifty years or so, that's a bit better, but the best we can offer in that department is, as Carlos pointed out, a program that we ourselves would flip past on the cable dial without so much as a second's consideration. What we need to be able to do is re-educate our students so that they no longer throw out the baby with the bathwater. The process of panning for valuable information is probably more difficult now than at any other time in history. Why not hone the skills the students already have, instead of vilifying them and the world they grew up in, and pining after some mythical yesteryear when "kids were better students?" Kids weren't better students in the "olden days;" they just didn't question their sources quite so often. Nowadays, no question is more important than "Who is telling me this, and why?"

<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ April 03, 2006 09:45 PM: Message edited by: Adam White ]</font>

[daveforester]

Bravo Adam! I wholeheartedly agree with you and Mike. As someone who grew up on video games, MTV (back when it was good), and lots of fast paced movies, I really don't think it affected my attention span much. I do think that a lot of the kids that we see have more access to various modes of entertainment than ever before: cel phones, internet, portable game devices and DVD players, 100+ cable channels, etc. It's not attention span that has been affected, but it may be that their patience has been negatively affected.

Your example of someone who can spend all of Spring Break engrossed in a level or two of their favorite game is a perfect example that our students still have a decent amount of attention and they are willing to sink their teeth into something even if it is difficult. However, they are now trained to flip the channel, turn on their phones or tune out if what is in front of them does not entertain them. And when something is not immediately entertaining they have very little patience for it.

I agree that we all should be embracing technology, but Carlos's point is still valid: a lot of resources (such as Ken Burns) don't rate real high on the entertainment scale, and besides just how exactly do we deal with finicky students who really want to be entertained? It's possible somedays, but everyday? I'd love to have student's working more on the internet but because of its long reach and because most everyone in tomorrow's job force will need to be able to use it on one level or another, but I only have 2 computers for 30 students. I agree that a lot of our methods are antiquated, but the reality is that tomorrow I walk into my classroom and I'll have to make due with the resources I have on hand. But I would like to know what your vision of a modern classroom / modern set of teaching methods looks like.

[MichaelSanchez]

In response to your last paragraph, lemme just ask a quick question and then sleep on it, cuz I might get carried away: are you talking no-holds barred, money is not an issue, what I dream about seeing in the classroom, using all the tech that we theoretically have access to? Or are you talking about, what can we actually do with what we actually have?

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[daveforester]

I guess I wasn't really thinking absolutely no-holds barred (read that to mean that you will not get the 10 foot long salt water aquarium with sharks and jellyfish in your class), but if we were to set up our dream classrooms, what would they look like and how would that significantlly affect (improve?) our teaching there? How would it affect our methodologies - what would it allow us to differently?