Old-School Tools in the Screen Pandemic

“Breathe with unconditional breath / the unconditioned air. / Shun electric wire. / Communicate slowly. Live / a three-dimensioned life; / stay away from screens.” ~Wendell Berry, “How to be a Poet”

After a recent galvanizing meeting with Mothers Against Media Addiction’s (MAMA) founder Julie Scelfo, organized by phone-freedom champion and therapist Julie Frumin, I was contemplating the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation of “no more than two hours of [recreational] screen time per day for children and teenagers.” After my students did their second tech checks (see my “Be Curious Not Judgmental” Tech Check post) they were gob-smacked at how much recreational screentime their phones logged. And I was noticing that educational screentime could use some boundaries too. Anyone who has sat through a lengthy slide presentation or edu-portaled away precious hours or filled out a template during professional development knows this. Few if any of those things feel nourishing or connection-encouraging.

And so, today, I want to take a minute for a desire-based lens on this question: What can we do to de-screen our classrooms, not just from phones, but by creating healthy boundaries with all the other screens that devour our students’ attention, including personal laptops, district-issued Chromebooks, the tyranny of learning management systems, and excessive slidedecks?

A few things came to mind:

Writing by hand: In my class we use old-school writer’s notebooks, composition books that we set up with numbered pages and a table of contents. We get prompts and write by hand, take notes, brainstorm, draft, doodle, watch our thinking come to life through brain-hand connection. This notebook becomes a physical artifact of our year’s growth, and a place that defies Google, Chat GPT, and SparkNotes. It is a place where we are human, creative, messy, and make meaning.

Read physical books: We dive into longer works that ask us to return to them again and again, voyaging deep into a character’s story. We tune our attention to a world that a human author created, and form a relationship with that world, seeing it through from the attention-grabbing opening to the messy middle, sticking around for the pay off at the end. One of my favorite ways to understand history is to read historical fiction, and I wonder what our history classes might be like if we used more novels and memoirs set in those time periods to deepen students’ connection to the facts, maps, events and dates they are absorbing.

Consider our common screen time: I use a basic document camera and LCD projector to model the by-hand writing we do. I’ve found that creating polished slideshows eats up my prep time, doesn’t allow for improvisation, and ultimately feel passive, keeping us all screen-bound. I know I do not enjoy the district’s many mandated slide presentations that feel more lawyer-created than educator-centered professional development. I don’t want curriculum to be passive, I want it interactive, not mediated by a web-enabled device.

Physical handouts: I prefer copying texts we are going to analyze so that students can physically annotate them and look at them more closely. Even though ultimately they will have to take standardized tests on a device, I think what matters more than test prep on a portal is authentic inquiry and deep engagement with worthy texts.

Human discussions rather than discussion boards: Students sit in groups of three or four and get up and move around the class to share with one another. They read from their writer’s notebooks, listen to their classmates, ask questions and give real time feedback. I drop in sometimes to listen and model authentic feedback.

Limit what is scored: Our learning management portals are exhausting. The demands of deadlines that blare from the system are overwhelming. I prefer to prioritize frequent practice and only score work after we’ve engaged with the skill a few times, sharing exemplars and my own models so students know how to strengthen their work. This also lets me have more time to do the most important part of my job, which is to listen, question, and encourage students to…

Embrace doing hard things as a path toward meaning: So often I hear people say they use tech because it’s “so much easier.” But we are languishing at the altar of the easy. It’s like saying we should eat dinner from a vending machine because it’s so much easier than making a nutritious meal we can gather around. Students want to add a reminder to their phone or take a picture of notes because it’s so much easier, but the moment they take out their device it bombards them with distractions and I question whether those pictures of notes ever make it into their brains. Yes, reading by-hand drafts of student work is harder than reading the neat font of a digital submission, but I also know it is their actual ideas, not machine-generated.

Go outside: Bureaucracy-free field trips can enliven an exhausted, overwhelmed, anxious group of students and teachers faster than anything I know. A mindful campus walk, a trip to some green space, a little time in the garden can refresh us and help us remember the beauty of the larger world, the one we want students to care for.

One of my favorite questions at Back to School Night came from a parent who said, “How do you deal with what Chat GPT is doing to us, not just academically, but spiritually, as humans?” He may even have laced this question with a well-placed expletive for emphasis.

I told him a bit of what I have shared on this desire-based post: that physical books and by-hand writing and lively human discussions are the antidote for the shallowness of machines and portals that constantly tell us we are not enough, that answers are either right or wrong, that we should be looking up ideas on the internet instead of engaging in our own complex, creative thinking.

Old school tools and practices can help combat the ongoing screen pandemic for us all. What do you do that connects you with your unscreened humanness? How do you connect with your own creativity, your fellow humans, the natural world?

Can you take a minute? Who knows what we might find

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