The Dog Ate My Homework

This morning I had to write the modern day equivalent of “the dog ate my homework” letter to Ruby’s home room teacher but this time the blame went to the internet. Or lack of it. Our connection went down last night throwing us both into a panic. I couldn’t access the recipe I was planning to make for dinner. Our Vonage phone line was down. But, most punishing (or rewarding) of all, Ruby couldn’t access her homework, which is posted daily to her school’s intranet site.

 I was full of suggestions. “Call a friend.”  “Look it up on your fancy new phone.” But, Ruby, sensing a get out of jail free card, was full of reasons why that wouldn’t work.  Eventually I gave up and grudgingly wrote the letter that she dictated to me on the way to school. She would have emailed it to me but…

So, I was particularly interested to read this cover story in The New York Times: If your Kids are Awake, They’re probably Online. The Kaiser Family Foundation has just published a study showing that 8-18 year olds now spend 7 1/2 hours a day consuming media through a variety of devices, particularly mobile ones. This trend is most pronounced for tweens (11-14 year olds) whose media consumption is even higher at 8 hours and 40 minutes (excluding media time used for homework!). That’s about equivalent to the amount of time my daughter spends sleeping each night. And because so many of them are multitasking — say, surfing the Internet while listening to music — they pack nearly 12 hours a day into that 8:40.

I wonder:  is having access to this constant flow of media and information good? Is it making my daughter smarter, or at least more worldly?  A pediatrician quoted in the article argues that it's time to stop arguing over whether it is good or bad and accept it as part of children’s environment, “like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.”
But I think it's more than that. Our kids will have to fluently navigate this media-saturated world when the grow up and, if childhood is a rehearsal for adulthood, they need all the practice they can get. Being successful in today's world means absorbing and analyzing tons of information, making social connections online, acting with ever increasing speed and, even more importantly, using this onslaught of information to contribute to the knowledge flow and create new knowledge.
These skills aren't necessarily the ones taught in school although they should and soon will be. At Ruby's school, creating and contributing to blogs has become a powerful learning tool. Rather than relying solely on the classroon and teacher, the kids continure their intellectual discussion afterschool and online.
In their ever increasing consumption of media - especially online - our kids may be teaching themselves the essential survival skills for succeeding in this new world