The Kids Think Differently

How can you educate when your own education was a lifetime ago?

I recently had the obligation of transcribing for a young student during an exam. Like any educator I find acting as a scribe difficult: your role in this context is to write exactly what they say, ask no leading questions, and not comment on their work during the process or afterwards. You do not transmit any of your knowledge to the student: not spellings, not dates, not perspectives. As a scribe you are merely the conduit for the work, so it is a much different occupation to teaching.

As my student dictated to me, I noticed that the way they formulate thoughts is different to how I formulate mine. I credit this, in the main, to it being common to use computers for schoolwork from a young age, to having been expected to even take exams and do classwork on a device, and to research methods for everything from checking your timetable to an essay worth 100% of your termly grade being entirely within the space of tabbed browsing. Some of the difference may be the approaches and emphasis of modern pedagogy and curriculum: I don’t know at what age children are taught to plan, for example, or if writing stories is considered as important now as it seems to have been when I was young [1] but I do think edit-as-you-go is much more widely available now than it was even when I was young, when word processing (including spellcheck and expected typesetting style) was already standard practice for longform work. Even with that available, we were taught on pen and paper. It was fascinating to watch my student formulate a sentence, formulate another clause, and go back and edit the sentence to include the new idea. Although I might end up at a similar point, with both ideas included and complex sentences in the answer, I would be formulating the next sentence in my mind as the one to include the new idea rather than finessing the previous one. Something about the way we work now has changed the processes of writing and thinking for the younger generation.

I am in an unusual position as an educator, as I teach two radically different age ranges, so I have access to students upon whom the expectations are wildly different. On the one hand, I have students who are expected to answer a 15-mark essay question at the end of a one-hour closed-book exam – the short, traditional way we (in this country) test secondary pupils; on the other, first-year university students, who will present an open-book term paper twice per module. One requires recall and regurgitation, the other requires wrestling with and deciding if you agree with what you are taught. Both are essential skills in an education. Despite the differences between the two types of teaching, I am aware that my 13-year-olds and my 18-year-olds are closer to each other than either is to me: undergraduates, too, are young enough that the ten or fifteen years between my schooldays and theirs have wrought seismic change in the way we teach, learn, and integrate technology into our daily lives [2] and I am trying to acknowledge the ability to connect and reflect is different in them to how it is in my head, and that the way they approach their assignments will be to craft in a similar way to my younger student, not how I myself might approach a question or task.

I am not a neuroscientist, and there is plenty of work on brain plasticity, developmental patterns and the cognitive impact of technology with much greater basis in scientific research and a bigger picture understanding that sees beyond a select handful of students [3]. I am also not a trained teacher, and so whilst I consider myself an adept and passionate educator I acknowledge that my work does not necessarily reflect pedagogical best praxis. As such, my observations may vary from what those who have been through years of education training see and the context they understand from their own education. There are a few things I would like to change about the way our brains have been wired, though, that I think will help education move forwards more productively.

I hate that the students can’t let a wrong thing sit. They would rip out a page from their books before letting a teacher see a half-formed idea or work they’ve moved on from. They spell-check as they go instead of at the end of a finished project. We can learn from wrong things: bad drawings allow us to see where we want to practise, questions that were answered before we could ask them show thought processes that will help in your essays, and saying something your colleagues disagree with shows there are multiple ways to approach a text. I hate that word processing and other methods of working on the computer have normalised entirely erasing a thought that was half-formed or ill-executed. One impact of this is that I do not see my students plan. It would be so easy to write bullet points or notes, or draw out blocking in sketches, before expanding your work to proper sentences, but we have learned to use the delete function of computers whilst ignoring the capacity to leave something half-finished and expand; they also do not let me see their thought processes, notemaking, or drafts, which would allow me to change my teaching to build in what is working and focus on things they may not fully understand but have effectively regurgitated for marks. Students, related to this, also cannot accept that something perceived to be wrong might be correct: there is a wavy red line under how I’ve spelled ‘notemaking’, but I choose an un-hyphenated version as correct [4]. Perhaps I am a contrarian whose arrogance allows her to believe she knows more than an AI, but I would like the power not to defer to hidden expertise (who trained these AI, and on what?) and instead be able to defend my work when pressed.

I am in awe of the power synergy with a word processor may give. When I learned to touch-type at the age of ten or so it unlocked the ability to think as fast on a computer as I can on paper, and with the ability to edit simultaneously to writing we may be grateful for the plasticity of a brain that thinks in that way. I do believe simultaneous edits will be incredibly powerful in the world of work and academia, just as touch-typing has been for me, but I hope that in order to teach students with this new style of thinking we neither ignore our own experience of thinking and the different neural pathways we have developed that our students may or may not have. I as an educator have the power to acknowledge that the kids think differently and that there is a benefit to it, whilst also wanting to provide the extra method – the old way of doing it, the one which is proven to work.

The way I look at educating – especially as an information literacy provider – in the age of computing is the same way calculators are used in maths: it is profoundly important that we learn to use all tools at our disposal, which means teaching our brains to compute and edit as well as teaching what we can do with a machine that does that gruntwork for us. Just as how we have established the need for both calculator and non-calculator papers in maths, I do think that some work done with a traditional pen and paper is necessary to not lose old styles of working as we develop new, perhaps more dynamic, working.

[1] important to note – I was always outstanding at English, so it may just have been me encouraged to write stories, but I do also remember handwriting practice and story-writing being on not only the curriculum but an option on the 11+ test that got me into high school.

[2] I also had the horrendous realisation that they didn’t live through 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, or the Obama campaign – as our module is diversity in American literature, this is quite jarring and honestly akin to finding your old possessions in a museum display.

[3] earlier this year I went to a talk by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (https://www.psychol.cam.ac.uk/staff/professor-sarah-jayne-blakemore) who shared practical pedagogical advice based in research – I defer entirely to her and her compatriots in research, as this analysis is based on me, a cultural studies PhD who hasn’t done science in 15 years, filtering it down to you. Go directly to the source to fact check my dilettante ass.

[4] Because I think the act of notemaking is, whilst a reflexive verb, distinct from other forms of ‘-making’ and the note is inherent in the making act here. I think in the modern world to make a note is so prevalent we are past the hyphenated stage where the words are separate and should acknowledge them as a single idea.

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On This Topic:

• I had a Sony Vaio laptop in high school. I chose it because it was neon red and the sales agent in PC World said it was a good deal; I did not realise it was a cultural icon.
• OK yes I am the fountain pen evangelist. So sue me, I want something I perceive as important to be fun. Anyway, here’s a great choice for a starter fountain pen (very wet, great for fun inks) and my favourite premium brand of ink.
• There’s a lot of good reasons to not use a calculator, and only some of them are brain atrophy.

To-Do:

• Oh god I’m out of queued posts, I have a million things to do but this one will hang over my head until I don’t.
• Return 2x items that will give me my monthly salary back. Also, claim for glasses!! Stop crying into your wallet and do something about it.
• Tidying. Tidy kitchen, tidy the pot you throw everything into when you come home, tidy the house… general tidying.

Today’s Culture:

• Re-read Wuthering Heights before even contemplating seeing the film and omg I love it so MUCH. I hadn’t forgotten how much I loved it, and have always called Emily my favourite Brontë, but going back again after 15 years was powerful.
• Tiny jams! My husband got me this cute bonne maman gift set and it’s so adorable and he said I should keep my inks in the tiny jars when I was done eating.
• It’s half term and I’m too busy to be relaxing or travelling, my life is full of small deadlines and endless reading and writing.