I have always loved to read. I would spend hours and hours just pouring over books visiting alternative worlds, making new friends, and creating long lasting relationships with the characters who take me along with them on their journeys. There was such a magical quality to losing myself for hours in books, that it shaped my lifelong passion as a voracious reader.
After reading the article, "Is Google Making us Stupid" by Nicholas Carr, this concept of how reading is changing had me concerned. Carr points out that since the rise of internet and technology, not only is the "way we read is changing, but the way we think is changing." As students grow up becoming avid users of the internet, play video games, and of course watch t.v. sustained attention is becoming much more difficult to attain.
I see this every day during our silent reading period in school each day. Students sit for 20 minutes with a book in hand and read silently the old fashioned turn the pages way. When I study the kids I see a variety of behaviors. There are the students who look at the book but are not actually reading anything, the students who are looking out of the windows, or at friends, and then there are the frequent fliers to the bathroom. There are of course still quite a few students who look forward to this time and settle in to their literary worlds, but what do we do to address these avoiders of reading?
On one hand I see value in giving my students the option of exploring online reading during this time, because at least they are reading and practicing this skill. On the other hand, I fear that if we as educators and parents don't nurture our children to experience books that require us to sustain our attention that we are going to lose this opportunity to connect with the ethereal experience of losing oneself in another world simply by turning pages.
It alarms me when I read this quote from the article, "And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think."
I don't have a reliable scientific answer to this, but I have observations as a classroom teacher as to how I see students changing. Students immediately reply, "Wait, what?" when they have been asked a direct question. I see students who are trying to engage in conversations that require critical thinking to make a point, but they get lost midway through their thoughts and can only dance loosely around the point they wanted to get to. Following multistep directions, even if they are written on the board, is nearly impossible. When students are confronted with something difficult, many do not know how to work through the problem without assistance. Attention is often short-lived and fragmented even during activities that are designed to be fun.
Maybe these are all just part of the development of children at this stage, but I just wonder if this article is really true when it says that "we are changing the way we think". And if it is changing the way we think, are we okay with our children losing the experience of sustained attention and reading a book the good old fashioned way?
