A Glimpse at the World of Teens

(this post is not about Summer Reading, I couldn't help myself!)

I am honored to be acting as a NYS judge in the national Letters About Literature program. I received my packet of letters this week and started reading and two things jumped out at me.

The goal of the program is for kids and teens to write letters to authors to let them know how their book changes their view of the world or of themselves. The letters I received were from 7th and 8th graders. I had kids from Nassau and Suffolk, as well as a few from Manhattan and a bunch from the Rochester area (the city as well as the rural/suburban areas around it).

The first thing I noticed was how many of the students talked about being bullied. It was without a doubt the most frequent theme in the letters and what was especially striking was how many of them said they had been picked on for no reason. I was proud, though, that they were willing to write about it in letters that went through their teachers, which tells me that anti-bullying efforts are working to at least help kids feel brave enough to talk about being bullied. It's an important first step.

The other thing that struck me was how many students made comments like "Living in my comfortable, middle class home, I didn't know that there was . . ." and then said things like poverty, racism, discrimination, war. It was shocking to me that in this age of 24/7 media and constantly being plugged in, our teens are that insulated from the world outside their doors. Now, granted, some of this is just teens being self-absorbed teens, but still.

This made me think again about an article by Douglas Rushkoff in the February, 2011 School Library Journal I've been talking about to everyone. It has to do with rethinking how we do technology with young people. The letters made me recall his comments about how social networking is changing the way we communicate. Discussing how communicating in virtual environments removes the 93% of communication that is non-verbal, he says "our interactions online become highly literalized, suspicious, devoid of context, and continually parsed for their real meaning. We end up experiencing one another much in the way someone with Asperger's does" (p. 31).

So. Yeah.

Instead of feeling inspired by many of the letters I judged that talked about how reading whichever book made them see what the world is really like, I feel oddly depressed. Mostly because I get the sense that this wasn't life changing for most of these teens, but just another assignment for school and that they would go back to their comfortable, middle class lives and forget the glimpse beyond their doors. And social media is going to help them do it.

Bluh.

Cash in the Coffee Can: $278