Panic in Our Pockets
When Jonathan Haidt came out with The Anxious Generation, I was already well on my way to worrying about my own smartphone usage. As a teacher, I’m at the forefront of being a good role model: at least 150 eyes judge my behavior every week.
What I’ve done with my phone is what I’m sure a lot of people who value their time, their work, and the people around them have done. We’ve managed notifications; monitored our Screen Time; experimented with leaving our phones outside our bedroom; tried out apps or functions designed to increase our focus by limiting phone/app use; deprived our phones of social media; talked endlessly with other people to commiserate and find out new tips; and worried about the youth of today and what they are doing with all the stuff that we are worrying about.
The thing is, even though I’ve done all those things above, I suspect that smartphone worries verge more on the moral panic side of the equation. I hear echoes of my childhood: “Don’t sit too close to the TV or your eyes will get messed up.” Or, “Video games and cartoons will rot your brain.” Or, “Heavy metal music will make you a deviant.” Moral panics have always plagued new technologies, as far back as Socrates worrying about writing. (Though I must say here that it is true that writing things down probably downgrades our memory skills just as much as smartphone GPS maps dampen our understanding of place. But to argue that both of these tools are a net negative is preposterous.)
One reason I think this is all a moral panic is that life was full of interruptions before smartphones. If you’ve ever lived or worked with other people, which is every human on Earth, interruptions are a natural part of our species. Sure, if you lived on a rural farm far away from others, you’d have less interruptions, but most people live where others live, dealing with all sorts of sounds, sights, and people demanding attention for all sorts of things. For instance, the sound of sleep in New York City varies widely from that of my suburb in Cincinnati. Humans adapt to reasonable norms.
Another reason lies in how we used to stave off boredom. On family vacations, pre-smartphone, my bag would be bulging with activities: books, music, and portable games. I’d sit in the backseat on long car rides, headphones on my head, listening to music as I retreated inwards on some tangent of interesting thought.
But then I’ll read another article telling me about how corporations studied psychology and physiology to design their apps to hijack my dopamine, and the resolve in my moral panic beliefs soften. Have I not seen detrimental smartphone use in my classroom? Oh yeah. Wasn’t I not culpable myself? Of course. Have I gone a week without seeing it in the wild. I don’t think so. Okay. Things were bad!
Looking at the Facts
This past school year, after Haidt’s book came out, I had my students confront the arguments surrounding smartphones, social media, and teens. We researched as much as we could, compiling our evidence on class Google Docs. Then students turned to checking their own perspectives–their own stories–with the parts of the debate that was most important to them. Some wrote about smartphones in school; some wrote about smartphones at home; and some wrote about smartphones in their own friend groups. Each student wrote with the various stakeholders of education in mind as their audience: teachers, parents, administrators, school board members, and other students.
It was a very timely piece of writing, not only because of Haidt’s book release but because Ohio was in the process of passing a bill that, if not enforcing limited smartphone use in schools, puts into law that all Ohio schools need to have a smartphone policy that limits its use.
After reading their work, I realized that students were just as confused I was. Few students felt very sure of the right perspective. And that makes sense. There are a ton of variables.
But through this whole process, I think I’ve found an answer, one that goes along with the lack of causality evidence out there.
What helped me out was this term: “prevalence inflation.” Here is a solid explanation from Derek Thompson’s “How Anxiety Became Content,” where I discovered the term:
In 2022, the researchers Lucy Foulkes and Jack L. Andrews coined the term prevalence inflation to describe the way that some people, especially young people, consume so much information about anxiety disorders that they begin to process normal problems of living as signs of a decline in mental health. “If people are repeatedly told that mental health problems are common and that they might experience them […] they might start to interpret any negative thoughts and feelings through this lens,” Foulkes and Andrews write. This can trigger a self-fulfilling spiral: Some individuals who become hyperaware of the prevalence of anxiety disorders may start to process low levels of anxiety as signs of their own disorder, which leads them to recoil from social activities and practice other forms of behavioral avoidance, which exacerbates their anxiety. [Emphasis mine.]
Instead of “anxiety disorders” and “young people,” insert “negative smartphone use” and “humans.”
A Natural Part of Being Human
A microscopic-level of scrutiny has always been put upon the younger generations. It makes sense: younger generations are always preparing to become the next generation of adults.
But this term, prevalence inflation, keeps nagging at me because I think this is part of the default state of most humans.
We know that all good human qualities can be pushed too far. Empathy is a wonderful human trait, but empathy gets out of hand when you start worrying about offending everyone to the detriment of your own mental health. I think that prevalence inflation is part of that matrix of human qualities, another good thing that can go bad if it’s overdone.
For instance, it’s great to be mindful of anxiety and mental health. But it verges on the path of hypochondria if we compare our every action to that of the symptoms of real mental health disorders, forging false connections with our amateur, non-clinical assessments. Especially with the amount of information we have access to on the internet. And we have a lot of problem-identifying information for every occasion, whether it’s a diagnostic check on why our ice machine in our freezers aren’t working or whether we are exhibiting signs of Obsessive Compulsion Disorder. Take me for instance, my own smartphone confusion and the teacherly example I will now indulge in.
One of the questions that I’ve never really seen answered–because it’s unanswerable–is how much structure is just the right amount for students?
Okay, yeah, let me explain why this relates to prevalence inflation.
I got into teaching because I was one of those students who was more of an autodidact than someone who craved structure. If you let me pick my own topic, I was super into it, totally nerding out on my own methods and how they could affect the end result. Process was fascinating to me, probably because I was totally mystified by how people did things. How did great guitarists I admired learn guitar? How did great writers build and research the worlds they created? How did video game designers create awesome games like Warcraft III or Goldeneye? I had no access to these answers, and I craved them, hoping that maybe I would luckily happen upon them in my own experimentations.
This meant that if you gave me a worksheet to start an assignment, I would just mentally drop out.
I started my teaching career informed from my own experience. I wanted most of all to give students what I didn’t have: autonomy. My first three years were comical. When a new teacher with little experience gives students a bunch of autonomy, it goes bad pretty fast. I felt like a disaster of a teacher until I hit my stride in my fourth year.
It was then that student autonomy started to become en vogue in the education world, and with my now better teaching skills, I embraced it more and more.
Teaching in a classroom with the “proper” student autonomy is a very difficult thing to establish. Student autonomy isn’t just giving students classroom space to work as total autodidacts. There needs to be a framework, and that framework can get very tricky and never perfect by its very nature.
One of the errors a new teacher might make is not being able to properly assess where a student’s skills are. A seasoned teacher is more able to figure out where a student is and to cater learning structures around them. Yet, this is still quite difficult. Yes, we have developmental standards, but in reality, these are more benchmarks. A good teacher meets students where they are regardless of where they should be.
Let’s take the teaching of a single punctuation mark, for instance, which sounds silly, but grade-level teacher teams can endlessly debate how to properly teach this, let alone when you are the only sounding board amongst the litany of professional research and amateur information on the web.
Here are some of the questions one must consider when teaching a single punctuation mark: What definition does one use for the punctuation mark? If there are multiple functions, which ones should be taught? Should students come up with their own definition before they see a professional one? How much should students know before drilling down to the function and importance of said punctuation mark? What examples are most helpful in learning this punctuation mark? Are they interesting enough? How should students practice it? Should group work be involved? How will you know they have accomplished the lesson’s goals? What is mastery? How would you know? How do you get them to use it naturally, in their own work? If so, how would making such a task not seem forced?
The questions get far more complex when a writing assignment is paired with a student-choice model that allows students to choose the topic they write about, the mentor texts that guide them, the most effective shape of their writing, and the evidence they use (narrative and objective). And then, of course, to reflect on what happened, why, and what that means for the next step.
Too much structure can be a cage and too little can make a student completely lost, like floating-in-space lost–nothing to grab onto. I think this is something any educator can agree to, no matter their preferred educational philosophies. Teachers are constantly struggle about whether to let students loose, give them free rein, or build guardrails for support. And since no one knows the totally right answer for all students, you really just have to experiment, adjust, and keep the worry at bay that you are not choosing the most right path. Otherwise, the result is an anxiety spiral or imposter syndrome.
The Student Choice Thesis
When I was doing my masters, my thesis, “Honoring Every Reader’s Path to Active Reading,” involved an experiment in a different sort of structure. Instead of requiring students to annotate things that they read, as I had done in the past, I gave students free choice to record their notes and thoughts however they wanted. This wasn’t just me saying, “Hey, kids, do reading notes your own way.” It was more like this: “Here is why we take notes when we read. There are tons of benefits to being active as we study and read things. Here are ways I’ve seen people actively read. Now which way would work best for you? How will you know?”
I liked this because I myself had a hard time with notes when I was a student. In school, I mostly took notes to keep awake, but I never really saw the need for them until I became a teacher. (Actually, being a teacher taught me more about education than any schooling ever did, even the schooling I did to become a teacher.)
When I started teaching, each lesson was an interesting problem and research project. I scoured books, articles, and other materials for my learning plans, making copious notes that would form these really interesting questions and discussions I wanted my students to experience. I was open, every moment, to an idea. Being an active note-taker really stepped up my learning plans in terms of complexity and creativity. It is something that I still love so much that I annotate most of the books I own and find it hard to use the same units twice. I still love getting into that mode of studying, discovery, and creation. It’s one of my favorite parts of my job because I know I am bringing something new to my students because it’s new to me. And that sort of infection always makes the lesson far more special.
After having done a couple years of the Active Reading System, even successfully through a pandemic, I was ready for the next step. This was to be called the Active Thinking System.
Yeah, I know. It’s all beginning to sound like an engineering class. But I wanted to give my students even more autonomy on how they think, all while reflecting on what’s working and what’s not. To do that, I cut out the requirement of having a notebook, which was a big part of my classroom’s tools. If a student worked best with a notebook, then they should use a notebook. If not, it was the computer for notes. If drawing or paper was absolutely needed, and a student didn’t have a notebook, then printer paper was a fine substitution.
It was ever my belief that students needed to find their own way of thinking and evaluate what ways worked and did not work for them. And if you didn’t have a solid system that you knew worked well, you were at a disadvantage when a class really stretched you. Because then you had to figure out both the how and the what.
During the writing of my thesis, I did a lot of people watching. Not only was I interested in the various ways my students thought outside of their brains, but I’d also notice how my colleagues took notes. I’d especially be watchful at and Professional Development even I attended with teachers from all over the area. And if I was ever in a coffee shop, I’d look around to see who was working and how they were doing so. It was nerdy and probably a bit too much, but I was fascinated. It was interesting how everyone designed their own way of thinking externally. People designed their own systems around laptops, tablets, tablets and styluses, fancy notebooks, old school composition notebooks, agenda books, etc. Some people even just used their smartphones. Why not let students experiment with the full range of the ways to think?
During those years when I only required notebooks and an Active Reading System, at the beginning of the year, I’d give my students a survey of all the different types of note-taking, detailing how each worked. There were digital scrapbookers that used a hybrid of paper notes and their iPhones camera. There were the digital notebook students who prized the convenience of digital in all ways, using say a Google Doc to keep track of their book notes. And then there were the old school analog people, writing notes in notebooks or in the a copy of the book itself. But regardless of what you chose to take notes on while reading, a notebook was a requirement for all else in class. When that was the case, less than about ten percent chose an all digital Active Reading System. Most chose annotating in their books or writing in their notebooks. The tried and true analog ways.
With the absence of required notebooks, the percentage flipped. Most students used their Chromebooks for everything.
I should’ve known then that something was wrong.
Don’t Go Too Far
It didn’t take me long to realize, though there was a lot of patience involved, that the notebook-less semester was a disaster. Most students had not designed a system that would work best for them, but they had designed a system that would work easiest for them. Notes occurred only minimally, if at all. And the distractions were rampant.
Duh. Of course this would happen. Students that go to seven bells of classes and participate in extracurriculars are constantly working out how to make things more efficient so that they can create more time for their own ends. (Like any human, really.)
There was only one thing to do: I went back to requiring notebooks right before the semester ended. And because I had let them experiment with these ineffective systems for half a year, I thought it would benefit them to make the second semester far more structured. So when students came back for the second semester, everyone now with a notebook, I had students explicitly follow my lead. Do what I did. Draw. Play around. Be messy. Ponder on the page. I had gone against the autonomous student-driven zeitgeist. I had had a solid taste of prevalence inflation, and I was correcting it.
It was a George Saunders quote that really gave me permission to grab more control in the classroom:
I like to start my class at Syracuse by asking my students to mentally open a set of parentheses, and precede the first one with the phrase, “According to George,” And, for the rest of the semester, I ask them to believe, or try to believe, or at least conditionally accept, my approach (my theories, my silly drawings on the board, my strained metaphors that don’t quite hold together under closer examination). This gives me permission to be as persuasive and passionate as I can, as I try to convey my sense of how (for me) this writing thing works.
I like the bit about how it “gives [Saunders] permission” to really go for it in terms of his teaching. We all get into teaching because we’ve had breakthroughs in learning, and it’s natural for us to want to show these stories to our students, to say, “This is what is possible.” It’s not to soak up all other perspectives and deem them faulty, but it’s a temporary trial for students to see things a different way.
At the end of the semester, Saunders ceremoniously ends his guided mentorship:
Then, at the end of the semester, I ask them to close the parentheses and follow that second parenthesis with this phrase, “That was all just according to George, and I may now discard.”
Whatever has stuck, they keep; whatever didn’t speak to them, I urge them to brush aside.
And this is kind of what happens anyway. Students go through a series of mentors and naturally throw out what doesn’t work and continue to use what does. The gauntlet of thinking and working through that thinking is what is most important. I think Saunders’s ritual makes that explicit, which is why I now use it in my classroom.
Next year, I’m going to be on a prevalence inflation hunt, reflecting on whether I’m buying into something because it’s what everyone is talking about. Fads and moral panics come and go, and we have to always be aware that humans very easily form mobs of all shapes and sizes.
You may think this stupid, but in this age of personal choice, it was profound to give myself more power to lead. Humans crave mentors, solid learners who are willing to share their journey, and that’s what teachers should be. It’s when we deprive students the choice to move about in their work that they chomp at the bit, as teenagers–and even adults–are wont to do.
But what I think the idea of prevalence inflation really gives me is a way to check-in with myself to ask if something is truly genuine rather than to be swooped up by prevailing winds.