Homework: Is Multitasking OK?
son regularly sits in his room, listening to music on his headphones, with a
textbook open, typing on his computer doing Instant Messenger with his friends.
He says he's learning fine, but his grades are far from perfect. I've been
wondering whether he's putting his brain on sensory overload and we ought to
put a stop to it.
What? He doesn't have the TV on,
too? Of course that's facetious. This is not a laughing matter. It's true: you
really can overdistract yourself to the point where you can't focus and
concentrate, and therefore can't learn. It becomes addictive, just like all the
substances and activities we all try so hard to keep our kids from getting
hooked on these days.
may be a way of life for teenagers today, but it's hard on the mind and makes
it awfully tough to think seriously and retain knowledge for any length of
brain learns in two ways: declarative learning, in which you
learn facts that can be recalled and used with flexibility, and habit
learning, in which repetitive uses of the same fact or skill allow you
to recreate the motion and repeat the task.
example of declarative learning is when you memorize someone's phone number and
can recall it whenever needed, no matter where you are or what you're doing.
But with habit learning, you have to be standing with a phone in your hand,
repeating the order of the numbers or listening to a musical cue.
preferable way of learning is declarative learning, but when you are distracted,
you tend to slip into habit learning. It is believed that having music on is
probably OK during homework, if it makes you happier. But ix-nay all the other
distractions, or the quality of schoolwork will suffer.
smart parents do is set reasonable rules, and stick to them like glue. If your
child is now spending hours and hours "plugged in," it might be too extreme to
just go unplugged. So start with a reasonable, stepped system: allow one hour
of electronic use per school night. If your child's grades stay the same or go
up, increase that to two hours. If your child's grades go DOWN, cut off the
electronics entirely. You've got to "pay" to "play"!
a 2005 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation that showed that youngsters in third
grade through senior year spent an average of 6½ hours a day on TV, videos,
music, video games and computers. Among its most important findings is that the
kids who are using the most media are the least happy. See: http://www.kff.org/entmedia/entmedia030905nr.cfm