No More "Wizard of Aaahs"

As I turned my desk calender to March (only 5 days late this month), I was reminded of the excitement I used to have at this time of year when I was a young child. You see, it was on a Sunday evening each March that CBS would broadcast its annual showing of The Wizard of Oz, replete with guest host and a huge national viewing audience. In the days before DVDs, VCRs, DVRs and other electronic acronyms, the only opportunity to be transported to that magical land was on that one night in March. I remember wishing I could own my own movie theater so I could watch the movie every day, but I also remember the great anticipation I felt as the overture played on our then-huge 19" TV set, and the sorrow I felt when Dorothy began tapping her red slippers and repeating, "There's no place like home." To be truthful, I wondered why she wanted to leave such an obviously great situation (complete adulation in technicolor) to return to black and white post-Twister Kansas, but that's another blog piece.

Now, of course, our children can watch anything at any time. In fact, most children don't even watch a whole show or movie anymore. They just watch their favorite snippets on YouTube. There has been a similar change in how we listen to music. We have moved from waiting for our favorite song to play once in a while on the radio, to purchasing satellite radio that plays only what we want to hear, commercial-free (but at a price). We have also moved from buying vinyl records that we had to listen to in a certain order (I still can't listen to Bridge Over Troubled Water without expecting to hear El Condor Pasa next) to having an entire music collection on an iPod that we can carry everywhere we go.

My listening habits are already vastly altered. I used to listen to each song all the way through to the last chord. I even listened to songs that I initially did not like, many of which have become my favorites over time. Now I hit shuffle play and find myself hitting the 'next song' button well before a song has ended. Many times I have only listened to a few seconds of a song before making my 'final' judgment and moving on.

Our children, who have never known anything other than the ability to fast forward, skip, delete, or mix and match, are even quicker to make decisions. We have to understand this mind set if we are to effectively teach them.

These technological changes are just the tip of the iceberg. Candidates are elected based on 15-30 second sound bytes and complex issues are "explained" in two sentence headlines. Food is fast and communications are faster: I have received text messages asking me to listen to a voice mail asking me to respond to an email before I've read it. Taking time to thoughtfully consider an issue is viewed as inefficient and a sign of intellectual weakness. This inexorably leads us to believe that a quick, albeit bad, response is superior to a slow but thoughtful one.

Now please do not misunderstand me; I am not sitting here reminiscing about the good old days when everything was great. Some things were better then and some things are better now. (I love my iPod - I just wish I had invented it.) Not every quick response is wrong and not every delayed response is necessarily smarter (or I would nominate the people who have been repairing my home for a Rhodes Scholarship). It's not that things have changed; they always do. My point is that these technological changes have far-reaching consequences in how our children think, view the world and learn.

We must provide our children with tools to counteract the subtle but pervasively different ways in which they "learn." We must no longer teach our children how to synthesize large amounts of information into smaller outlines and notes. They do that every time they text someone or Google something. We must now teach them how to extrapolate from bits and bytes of information to deeper meanings and more comprehensive understanding. We must help them to learn how to delay gratification and develop deep personal relationships in addition to five hundred Facebook "friends." We must teach them that an answer is right, without regard to the amount of time it takes to discover it, and we must help them to understand that they cannot expect to text-message God and develop a deep relationship with Him.

By the way, I now own my own DVD of the Wizard of Oz. I have never watched it.