Day 9

Ran around like a crazy person today, but not in the gym or on the road.  Just after kids, up and down the stairs helping Nick take things down to the car and then up and down more stairs to his apartment when we got there.  And literally running around my school looking for a student who was supposed to bring me an artwork she had done which I wanted to put on an exhibition I had to put up in the city for an IB conference.

Driving in Boston is always quite stressful although I was pleasantly surprised by how much easier it was today, being in the middle of the day, so not as much traffic as during rush hour.  When we first lived here we had bets with another recently-landed family about who would be the first to drive in the city.  There was no such thing as a GPS appliance which talked to you and told you where to go.  We lived quite close to good public transport so it was easy for us to avoid taking the car in to the city for quite a long time.   A few years later I was very amused to see this:
 
Boston has seemingly endless one-way streets so if you go wrong somewhere it is hard to maintain your bump of location as you try each dizzying new turn.  But today, my mind-map worked pretty well, aided of course by a helpful app on my phone. How the world has changed in such a short time!  But I knew where I was going, I had a sense of where everything was, in which direction lay the sea, the Common, recognised familiar landmarks.

The spacial map in the hippocampus is larger in London black cab drivers than in ordinary people.  The connections caused by learning "the Knowledge" a system of 40 000 streets and landmarks around London, causes connections to develop and grow, almost like making a bigger space, like opening a drawer and slipping in a sheaf of maps.  We have so many maps in our heads, the people of my generation, especially from travelling the world, or from moving, living in different cities, but I think my sons' generation's maps are much smaller.  They have never really had to find places by trial and error, by following a map in a book, trying to memorise a route.  Once you have found your way you remember it for next time, and grow the map in your head as you do so.   GPS/Sat-Navs have been around since my sons began driving, so they listen to the directions more than remember the way for the next time.  And so less connections are made.  It is just one more way in which technology affects the brain.

Already our brains, and particularly children's brains, have shorter attention spans.  "Technology conditions the brain to pay attention to information very differently than reading. The metaphor that Nicholas Carr uses is the difference between scuba diving and jet skiing. Book reading is like scuba diving in which the diver is submerged in a quiet, visually restricted, slow-paced setting with few distractions and, as a result, is required to focus narrowly and think deeply on the limited information that is available to them. In contrast, using the Internet is like jet skiing, in which the jet skier is skimming along the surface of the water at high speed, exposed to a broad vista, surrounded by many distractions, and only able to focus fleetingly on any one thing."  -http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-power-prime/201212/how-technology-is-changing-the-way-children-think-and-focus

I thought that was such a beautiful metaphor when I read it.

Technology is amazing, wonderful, awful, terrible, fantastic, destructive, time-consuming, marvellous, distracting, helpful, seductive, addictive....  I love the app Whatsapp, because it enables me to communicate with my relatives and friends all over the world, but I hate the fact that what my 7th-graders are mostly doing when they have finished their homework is watching YouTube videos.

I love that you can look up anything online, like being able to read all the papers given at a conference in Australia on Adult Literacy.  But I hate that the adolescents of today are learning most of their sexual knowledge from internet porn, which anyone can access on a phone nowadays.

I love being able to listen to audio-books while I clean the house, or drive home, or wash the dishes, tasks that would otherwise be deadly dull.  I hate that many children will mostly choose to play video-games, if given the choice.  I recently chaperoned a four-day field trip to a Nature's Classroom camp, where no technology was allowed.  Everything was learned by doing, the science of frisbee flight was taught by playing Ultimate Frisbee and then experimenting and discussing how a frisbee actually flies.  The characteristics of fire were learned by making fires and cooking over them.  The nature of quartz was seen on a dark night-walk.   There was also tons of free time, and what I noticed was that everyone just ran about, playing running games like basketball and soccer and another crazily physical game which seems to have been invented there.  So when there was no technology they all just ran about, and seemed so happy, and so tired every night that there was no bad behaviour, no noise, everyone just fell into bed exhausted and slept very well.