 Hi, and welcome to the very first episode of Screen Time Reset. I'm your host, Lauren Pear. For the uninitiated, Screen Time is the time we spend on smartphones, tablets, TVs, and computers. And most of us have noticed that the time we're spending on these devices has increased dramatically from the past decade or so when smartphones really became ubiquitous. And most of us kind of just fell into our habits with these devices. They do a lot of cool things and we just sort of adopted them without really foreseeing how central they've become to our lives and some of the unintended consequences they have on our brains, our children, even our social and political fabric. But now there's been some time, so research is coming out. We're able to see patterns emerge out of anecdotal accounts. And so the idea of this show is that armed with this information, it's time for us, both individually and as a society, to have a Screen Time reset, where we're resetting our relationships with screens so that we are consciously choosing our relationship and trying to harness the benefits while minimizing the harms. So that's the focus of the show. Our first mission is to educate on what screens are doing. And the second goal is to come up with solutions and really to facilitate those solutions when possible as well. Also, the focus is going to start on children and families. This is for two reasons. First, children are more susceptible to the seductive pull of technology. They don't have the prefrontal cortex development to exercise self-control. And second of all, they're also more sensitive to the effects of screens. So we're going to start there. Which brings me, I'll transition now into the topic of this first episode, which is getting the perspective of teachers who have been in the profession for quite some time on how they're seeing children change as a result of screens and the implications this has for both their academic and professional success. I think teachers really have a unique perspective because they spend more time with kids than anyone else. And they also see new cohorts of kids year after year after year. So they have this longitudinal experience that is so valuable and I think it's really key to learning about, to understand what's happening with kids and screens. So with that, I am delighted and honored to introduce and welcome my first two guests who are Joe Clement and Matt Miles. They are teachers in Virginia with over 30 years combined teaching experience. They are fathers and they're also co-authors of a fantastic book, Screen Skooled, which I highly recommend. It is just full of excellent research, compelling anecdotes, and really incisive commentary on this topic. So if you're a parent who cares about this topic, you should probably own this book. And with that, thank you so much for joining us. Joe and Matt, could you please tell us a little bit more about your background, maybe some important things that I didn't mention? And also, how it is that you became so passionate about this topic of screens and kids? Well, thanks, first of all. Thanks very much for having us. And thanks for the very nice things you said about the book and the work that we've done. We, as you mentioned, we've got between us over 30 years of teaching experience. I have more of that 30 years than Matt does. But we both noticed probably six, eight years ago that things were changing in the classroom. They were changing for the worse. And so we started to think of reasons that might be happening. We do what's kind of talking informally about it. And we started to read everything we got our hands on about why this was happening. And was anybody else noticing it? And we found that there were lots of people noticing it, not just teachers, but brain researchers and family therapists and psychiatrists and psychologists. And the more we read, the more we realized that there was a common link. And that link was screen time, the overuse of screen time. If you look at the subtitles, it's about overuse. It's not about just all technology's bad, blah, blah, blah. We both come to this with the backgrounds in IT. So we didn't come into this with an agenda saying we're going to try and submarine the educational technology movement or anything. We came into it saying why are we pursuing to have more trouble in the classroom? And this would be the answer to the most common and the study that we read, the people that we talked to, this was it. So we started to look at what was out there for about schools, kids and schools and technology in the mix. And there was a lot out there about how to use more technology in the classroom. But the real thing about the science behind that or what's happening with kids' brain and so we decided well, if there's nothing out there, we should write a book. So we wrote it and thanks for having it there, we forgot to bring one. But thanks very much for having us again. Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad that you clarified that point because I think it's so important that you guys are believers in tech, you're users of tech. And so I'd like to start off by asking you what you see the big benefits of tech being and what has to be in place for people and students to really take advantage of those benefits. I mean, we're obviously having all the tech is bad. There's a lot of productive science to technology. One of the things is Joe and I wrote a book using a lot of the research we got from the internet. We're having a Zoom meeting right now on our laptops. There's a lot of great things you can do with technology, but it's our experience that when we walk around our classroom, we're not seeing kids doing productive things with their cell phones or not seeing kids doing productive things with their laptop. They're not having Zoom meetings or they're not using Excel spreadsheets or coding or... Primarily what they're doing, the research backs this up is they're playing games, they're watching movies and they're watching movies with kids playing games. There's something spectacular about how they're using technology and the average kid is using technologies for or they're consuming over nine hours a day of digital technology almost entirely, you know, this old self-amusement and passive consumption. They're not creating, there's all kinds of, you know, not worthwhile things, but they're doing the problem is the productive side of technology is way less appealing to an analyst in mind than the entertaining side. So it becomes quite a challenge for a teacher to pull the kids from the entertainment and give them the real-life productive side and I think that's what a lot of the people do. Yeah, absolutely. I think that it makes teachers' jobs incredibly challenging and it's a little unfair that teachers it seems are always sort of holding the bag on this that they have to be more engaging when it's just like you can't be as engaging as Netflix or, you know, whatever else is not a fair benchmark. So from your broad experience, like I said, I love talking to veteran teachers because you have this longitudinal experience. How have you in broad strokes seen kids change over the past 10 or 15 years? Well, the main thing would be, well, there are a couple of key areas. The social interaction has really taken a hit. The their ability to focus, their ability to solve problems is big critically. Those are the four we typically talking about. Socially, they're just they have trouble looking through the eye. And it's beyond, you know, somebody can't look through the eye when they're talking to you. That's not the worst thing in the world. But we know that there's a whole bunch of research out there about, for instance, about empathy and how it's empathic kids are and things like recognizing emotions. And what is what is somebody else experiencing? This other person that I'm talking to, what are they experiencing? And kids have gotten way worse over over years. And this again, this is just our observation. There's a lot of scientific evidence that they got worse at recognizing things like facial expression, body language and so on. The good news is that can be reversed. There are there are several like, I mean, for life, we're going to call them rehab camps where they sent kids for a week or 10 days or two weeks. And at the end of a week or two, even of being totally screen free, kids, empathy scores go way up and they start to recognize, oh, this means this person's in pain in some way. And and that makes obviously the job of the teacher more difficult with kids aren't empathic and they're not able to interact socially and and do simple things like say, hey, we didn't get the other work on this project. And if that becomes an assembly block, then, you know, we're really in trouble. They have wonderful time solving basic problems, following basic directions that almost we're trouble focusing. If you're if you believe it's out there in the literature, it's the average student is using three or four devices when they're trying to do homework, their phone, their laptop, their iPad, some sort of music player. And so their their attention has always been split from one device to the next. And then you get in a classroom where you're supposed to sit before it by minutes or an hour or an hour and a half. It's very, very difficult. And that has been that's become clear to us. So the last, like I said, six or eight years. And then one of the first things you were talking to other teachers, hey, are you seeing this and almost everybody we talked to you said, yeah, there are especially people who've been teaching for a while to agree. And that wasn't just in our ability to start to reach out to people in adjacent buildings and then around the country, eventually around the world. And it's a pretty ubiquitous trend. Great. Yeah. You know, my background is in economics and I also did some work in workforce development. And so I really think a lot about that that angle of it as well and what you're talking about the interpersonal skills, the problem solving, also deep thinking. These are things that I've identified. I think I coined the term human competitive advantages, which are things that we humans do better than computers. So it strikes me that in this age of AI, increasing rapidly and automation, that to stay relevant in the job market, it's really important that kids hone these human competitive advantages since they will be competing with AI and, you know, and automation. And so, you know, you talked a bit there about their interpersonal skills, trouble making eye contact, trouble understanding what other people are thinking, which is pretty big. Can you tell us a little bit about problem solving, too? I think that sometimes that can sound kind of vague. Do you have concrete examples of of how children's problem solving skills have declined? I mean, we've got, yeah, we've got plenty of it. And some of these are going to seem and, you know, you can look and say, well, that's just one kid in one situation. And if it was just one kid in one situation, that would be one thing. These are, we see things like this all the time. So the example of increasing the rate of any increase in them will travel at a different point. Right. And so the one that leads to my mind is that I teach economics and one of the simulations we do is productivity simulation, essentially, they're different sized teams and they have to cut out shapes in the team that have the high school activity, which is the output divided by the number of workers. When the game is usually won by the team will be the fewest kids because everybody has two pairs of scissors. You have 10 people on your team, we have two people on your team. So it's not really a fair game to start with, which is kind of the point of the exercise. But two years ago, I was doing this and every single time I've ever done this activity, the team of two has won it. And I noticed the team of two in this particular case where they were just sitting there and I walked out and I said, well, what's what's going on? And they said, well, we're we're trying to we're trying to fold the paper and cut and stuff. But these are right handed scissors and I'm left handed. One of the kids said, and I kind of stared at them and said, well, are you left handed to the other kid? And she said, no. And I said, OK, I helped them arrive at the idea that maybe they should change jobs. And so they, oh, oh, and they actually moved on how do you win a productivity simulation? And they didn't see an answer that translated to what they were trying to do. So they just gave up. And they were sitting there looking through their phone. And so that was the first time ever that a team of two had lost that game. And after that, I was really disturbed by the fact that it seemed like a pretty obvious thing. I think to most people that, oh, maybe the person's right handed, she needs the right handed scissors. The other person should be folding and tracing or whatever. And again, that's an isolated example of course. It doesn't mean that, well, OK, they obviously lost problem solving ability because they're cell phones. But there are things like that. I mean, we had a three hour show and we could cut in three hours worth of those. I always just add to that, too, you mentioned earlier the benefits of technology. But technology is used to exploit underlying skills. And when we see a lack of problem solving, critical thinking, creative thinking, they like research to become really hard for kids to do. Like Google is so intuitive, you don't need to be teaching kids how to use Google. They know how to type and click in a bar. What to search is where they really struggle. They don't know what to search. I say I'm probably storing the book about a kid who couldn't find any primary source, comes up to me. There's no primary source on my topic. And I said, well, what's your topic? And he said, the Bible. It's just an idea of so many kids are coming up and saying, well, I don't know what to search. And you have to kind of walk their hand. But technology is really great if you have underlying personal skills. Social media can amplify those. If you have creative thinking and problem solving skills, research and research databases are wonderful for that. But when kids grow up with this technological aid, they don't develop these underlying skills. And then there's nothing to be amplified. I mean, think about social media, for example. They don't have, a lot of kids grow up using social media. They're only method of communicating. And the quality of communications on social media is far superior to the community face to face. Definitely. And with that, we're going to take a break and then just come right back in and start up again. So we'll be right back. Hi, I'm Rusty Komori, host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. My show is based on my book, also titled Beyond the Lines. And it's about creating a superior culture of excellence, leadership and finding greatness. I interview guests who are successful in business, sports and life, which is sure to inspire you in finding your greatness. Join me every Monday as we go Beyond the Lines at 11 a.m. Aloha. Hi, my name is Amy Ortega Anderson, inviting you to join us every Tuesday here on Pinoy Power Hawaii. With Think Tech Hawaii, we come to your home at 12 noon every Tuesday. We invite you to listen, watch for our mission of empowerment. We aim to enrich, enlighten, educate, entertain and we hope to empower. Again, maraming, salamat po, mabuhay and aloha. And we're back. So I wanted to, you know, Matt and Joe were just telling us about how problem-solving skills have deteriorated. And I was curious if you guys could tell us more about how children's thinking has changed and deep thinking in particular. Actually, I wanted to start by reading the first paragraph in the third chapter of your book, which is reclaiming your child's ability to think and then let you expand on it and maybe give us a concrete example. One of the hottest topics in education right now besides how to incorporate more technology into classrooms is how to improve students' critical thinking. Over the last decade, teachers across the country have been moaned and marked decline in their students' ability to think for themselves. Formal stable activities such as creative writing prompts, formulating opinions, developing arguments or answering open-ended questions are becoming increasingly challenging for students. Many teachers have simply abandoned them because their efforts to generate deeper levels of thought seemed futile. Everyone is trying to figure out ways to improve critical thinking in students, but no one seems to be trying to figure out why these skills were lost in the first place. I thought that was alarming. I mean, as someone who isn't from education, I didn't realize that teachers were having so much trouble with these staples as you put it. So could you tell us a little bit more about that and maybe give us an example to illustrate? Sure, I think there's a couple of things going on. One of the, and this is not necessarily technology related, but the standards-based movement where there was a period of 10 or so years at least in our state where there was a tremendous value based on fact recall. I know this thing happened and put some bubble in the red bubble and you get the prize or whatever. You get the coin in the test. But you combine that with the environment in which the students' brain is operating today, which is the Google environment, and all period long students are allowed to have their cell phones or their laptop. They're looking things up. And so they will tell you, students will tell you that they're thinking all the time and they know things and whatever. And that's not really thought. That's just looking things up. And so they will, we are outsourcing our ability to think critically about something and we're replacing that with just, okay, well Google will tell me what date this thing is or whatever, you can look anything up. And when you can't look at it, is it your opinion about something or what was the effect of this thing on this other thing or there's some bigger issue other than just knowing a piece of information as soon as we've been struggled. And one of the shared parts is that it used to be that it was easy when you would see in a prompt, what is your opinion of blah, blah, blah, you get, okay, I don't have to know your opinion for this one. And you could just write your answer in and really you were displaying your knowledge because you would say this is my opinion and this is why I think that it's on. Now it's very difficult to get that out of students. What's your opinion on the 14th Amendment, the human protection of the laws and you'll get an answer like that's in section one of the 14th Amendment. Okay, yes it is, but what does that mean or why does it apply to you and how does it apply to your life, your school life? That to me has been the sharing part about the declining and deep thoughts. Yeah, the lies are what kids really show. Why is this and can you explain this and that's where they kind of think like Google. You know, and this is, we were talking to a group of middle schoolers a couple weeks ago, we asked them, what are some productive things you do with your technology? Kid Rick, Rose Dandy said, I have this app on my phone and I take a picture of the math equation and it instantly gives me the answer. So that's, they had the most productive use of kids and you know, the teacher went out that that was cheating and he was baffled by that. It's like he gives me the right answer instantly and what Joe just said too is that it kind of illustrates the evolution of that idea is we are outsourcing a lot of our cognitive function to our devices. You know, one of these pro-tech articles we read, you know, even he, the writers opened with a quote from a girl said when I lose my phone, I lose half my brain and I totally agree. When you depend on your phone to generate right answers your brain isn't doing that and that teachers, our goal isn't, we don't have a quota of correct answers we need to if by the end of the day we want to see that you can do it, your brain can do it. You can generate a right answer on your own and unfortunately kids aren't giving themselves that chance. I equate the phone to, you know, teachers can relate to the story. You know, there's always one kid that that can answer a question, they just raise their hand immediately and shout out the answer. Before any other kid has a chance to think about it and that's detrimental because some kids need that minute to think and recall. Now we have our phones doing it. Of course, the phone is the kid that ruins every question, you know. They answer this for you before you even can recall. Now recall is so important to internalizing knowledge and recalling information of the future. And that's bringing up, or kind of going back to what Matt said earlier. Earlier generations, people our age and older had developed these skills. And so the phone or the laptop or whatever could enhance those. And some of us are certainly guilty about sourcing our ability to think, but if you're 14 or 10 or even 16 or 18, you've really not known much of life without a device to do those things for you. So if you never developed the ability to think deeply critically, to solve problems and so on, I don't know how we're expecting kids to be able to do that. And the temptation for that is always, well my phone won't know. And that's really a good way to dial like that. Yeah, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. It's really interesting. And it's interesting too, because there's a chapter in your book that I really love the title of the chapter, which was the myth of the technologically enhanced super kid. And it seemed like there was this big push to convince society and also within schools that technology was going to make this new generation of smarter, better critical thinking, more knowledgeable students. And it's so interesting to see what you're reporting because it seems like the absolute opposite. It wasn't just false. It was like the opposite of what happened. So how did that myth become so pervasive? And what was the research to back it up? Well, big tech companies paid a lot of money for research, but any time you hear about the technology or the technologically enhanced super kid, you're hearing about the focus on what can be done with technology. And it's this absolute focus on all the positives. And it'll even sometimes, if you people spin, like how kids are learning from video games problem about solving some dexterity we hear a lot about. So, but that's not how kids are actually using it. So if you thought of kids who's only using their spare time to research and write and compose and do digital photography, and that's how they spent the eight hours, nine hours a day on technology. Yeah, they may be better off than they were before, but that's not reality at all. And there's such overmuch a disconnect between what we see as kids and what parents see kids using technology to do. What we're told kids are being doing by companies who happen to be selling that thing's technology. Most parents or most teachers, people who interact with kids on a daily, they just wouldn't look at a kid on the phone and be like, I'm glad you're doing such wonderful things on that, but you turn on an ad or something like that. That's what you're inundated with is a research and we're being inundated as teachers is all again, focus on what they can do with it. And it's not at all based in what they are doing. Yeah. And there's a chapter in the book also called the education industrial complex. And part of your question was how did you get that way? And you got to mention this, but if you're a principal or a superintendent and your school district is struggling and schools all over the world are constantly being called on to do more, and it should be and held accountable for making sure the kids are reaching their potential. If you're a superintendent or principal and you're worried about the way your school system's doing and somebody comes to you and says, hey, we got the answer. We've got, and they take it to lunch or whatever and they give you a quick presentation and they show you all these cool tools and things like that can be done. You're gonna buy in. So, and the issue is if you're in a big school system, you might make, if you're a salesman for Dell or Apple or whatever, you might make a 50 or 80 or 100,000 sales in one conversation, you know? So that's a lot of bang for the buck for the tech industry to focus on schools, particularly in big school districts. Yeah, yeah, that's kind of alarming, but that's the reality and it's important to realize that. So, we are running short on time and unfortunately I wanted to delve more into sort of the complaints about employers these days with the newest batch of students that are graduating and there's some really fantastic examples in this book on that. I can know having worked last year for a state senator that the business leaders in our district were certainly complaining about interpersonal skills, motivation to show up on time and a lot of the things that are hit on in this book that are so important and again, there's a great discussion in here on it. To wrap up, you know, I like to be solutions focused. I mean, what are your takeaways and what do you see as a solution to this issue? Yeah, I think the first thing is you have to have a reasonable expectation of what kids can do with technology. A child's still a child and you can't just hand a kid something that is a toy for eight or nine hours a day and then expect them to realize the full potential. We have to have reasonable expectations. If you want a kid to use more productive, less entertaining side of technology, you have to have parental or teacher oversight. Over that you have to keep them on task and you have to pull them out of that entertainment and have reasonable expectations for kids. The great thing about kids is they're always just gonna be kids. So that's, I think, the person, the foremost. Second thing which is that parents have to ask themselves and their teachers and their schools how is this thing, this device or this app or this way of doing things better than the non-digital version, the non-screen-based version, the analog version, for lack of a better word, like if you're talking about online textbooks, there are a lot of school districts now are going to online textbooks. That's a cost savings, I guess. But is it better for kids, is that really what's better for kids? Well, there's tremendous amount of research showing that people, not just kids, people learn better from paper textbooks, not digital textbooks. So we have to have a reason that we're using a digital tool. We have no problem at all with using digital tools or any kind of tools when it makes sense, when it's better with the best available option for a kid. For example, I would give, I had an astronomy class in college and the inside front cover had a star map and the book was printed in Iowa that I would school in Virginia. And so the star map was good some of the time for part of the map if you were in Iowa. And that's not very helpful, that's a paper version of a star map. But if you put Google Sky on your phone for free, you can point it at the sky. During the day, and it'll tell you what's in the sky or point it at the ground or point it at the other side of the earth and dump. So that's really useful. That's a way better use of, that is far superior than a paper star map. So the second thing we would urge all parents and teachers to ask is why is this thing better that we're doing with this digital tool? How is it better than non-digital? And the last thing is don't be afraid to speak up. If you're a parent that schoolwork systems are surprising or accepted as a parent, especially over teachers and students who they're used to complaining about things, parents can impact change. If you're unhappy with your child being forced to spend their evenings on a laptop because it sticks up there, eight teachers require online homework, speak up, mention things. Try to say, this is what, is there an alternative to this because I'm trying to set screen limits for my child and this is making it very difficult. So to speak up, it'll be the instrument of change, I guess. I was just to check on parents have a key role in all this. Yeah, I'm completely with you guys there and I think that's such an important point. And that leads me to make a quick announcement that I wanna make that next month I'm gonna be starting a group or a network of parents who, if you're watching this episode, you agree this is an issue and you wanna elevate this issue in your school, shoot me an email at screentimereset at gmail.com. Next month I get to try, it'll probably be a Facebook group connecting parents so that they really have that support because a lot of the parents I talk to who care about this issue, they feel very alone, they're not connected or aware of the other parents at their school that care about this issue. And even if it's via Facebook and it's not all from the same school, just having that support, people to learn from, people to get encouragement from, I think that the passionate parents are out there and we need to connect them. So I said this show is solutions focused and that's a way that I hope to help facilitate that. And with that, I want to thank Matt and Joe so much for being with us again. I also wanna say one more time, fantastic book. I've read it myself, it's completely marked up, so good. Please get it. And I also wanna thank the great people at Think Tech for making this all possible. And to you, the viewer, I know that you're busy, especially if you're a parent, and that you take the time to tune in and learn about this important topic. I really commend you and honor you for that, especially since it can sometimes be uncomfortable and I'm sure there's plenty of other amusing content vying for your attention. So thank you so much and until next time.