A lot of the reasons we do not pay attention in class is because the material is not interesting or the teachers are not proving to us it is essential to learn it. Sandy questions why young people don't enjoy classical music or Moby Dick, but these are not our generation or culture. Adults in the academic worlds don't try to understand our culture or how much we actually absorb or learn everyday. My writing professor said to us the other day that we must be extremely interesting people outside of class. He asked us what reading material we had in high school english courses and all the books we read he read 30-40 years ago. It is time for academics to update what is essential for us to learn and maybe we would focus more.
However just because we want an update to our curriculums does not mean we still don't want some of the classics. Personally I read historical fiction, mysteries, and authors such as Jane Austen in high school. There is a stereotypical idea that young adults want to read teen books like Twilight or books just on social behavior of our own age. Some of us enjoy reading as long as the topics are interesting enough and we can relate them to the context of our world.
It is required of us to research constantly and use the internet to our advantage. Young people today may be able to navigate it well when it comes to websites meant for entertainment but when it comes to finding real scholarly knowledge we weren't properly trained. That is why I feel it is more stressful having to use computers constantly. It wasn't the young people who chose to live through technology, it was thrown at us from every direction and there was no way of getting around it.
Since I was a little kid I have had a passion more movies. Watching movies to me is not just staring at a screen for 2 and a half hours straight. I learn and absorb so much more from film than I do from reading. There is so much information that can be learned about history from film that many teachers discredit. In film though some facts may be blurred if we learned history by watching interesting movies about it we would absorb so much more and maybe have an actual context for the reading material that all these adults claim we cannot understand. From watching movies I knew so much more about the human condition and the world around me then from anything I learned in class. I wanted to write about the films I saw, In my film class I could write 8 to 10 pages on a movie yet for my writing class I could get barely 3 or 4 on our research topic. It was because I had no interest in what I was reading and did not want to trust the writings of scholars that had no impact or meaning. To me they were just someone who wrote an essay.
Sandy goes on to talk about how spending times on our computers keeps up from interacting with other people. This i agree with but I don't think it is the endless computers but the endless homework and studying the school require out of us now to succeed. I was an honors and ap student in high school the amount of work I had was un-believable. There were point when you had to say, "I'm not doing that assignment," or I'm gonna stay up all night to do it," so you could spend a little time to enjoy living and actually see other people.
However I do not think computers and technology is responsible for changing young peoples of idea of write and wrong. Those morals are instilled in us from our parents or family at young ages and transfer over to the technology. If someone is mean or cruel online they will most likely be that way in person that is human nature not technology. Technology is not something that is going to go away and as long as it is required for us in a educational way, young people will not start to pull away from it.
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