The Winter of Our Disconnect (22 page)

What wasn’t so heartwarming was my mood. I resented the fact that writing by hand took so damn
long
. And I was completely horrified by my own revision mania—a compulsion the delete key had been politely concealing all these years. It was nothing to use up an entire sheet of lined paper to produce a single useable sentence. I found that disturbing. Also confusing. Without the accustomed visual order of flawlessly justified chunks of prose, it was so much harder than I’d anticipated to maintain my momentum, let alone to preserve the logical flow of ideas. Even more of a struggle was trying to keep to my word length—a rigid but comforting constraint for any columnist, a sort of snugly fitting seat belt of the mind. On a Microsoft Word document, even without the word-count function, I could tell at a glance where I was within a few words, like an old woman who measures the flour for her loaf by the fistful. Writing in longhand I lost all sense of that inner compass. Between the cross-outs and scrawled interpolations, I never knew where the hell I was. Like a whiny kid in the backseat, it was a constant case of “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”

Plus, it hurt. The last time I’d held a pen for that long was probably in second grade. Back then, my teacher described my handwriting as “lazy.” It was swiftly apparent that the passing years hadn’t done much to energize it. My words looked so provisional on the page, so vulnerable and unsure of themselves. I missed the visual authority of my favorite font (Century Schoolbook), the neat margins and perfect spacing: the hospital corners, if you will, on the page. But more than anything, I missed the sheer velocity of word processing.

I took touch-typing as an elective in eighth grade—it was that or sewing—and it was probably the single most useful course I ever did. (And I still believe sending my daughters’ skirts out to a tailor for hemming was a small price to pay.) By the time electric typewriters came in, I was able to transcribe my thoughts almost as fast as they happened—often surprising myself in the process. “Good Lord, do I really think
that
?” I’d marvel, or cringe. The keyboard wasn’t something I simply used for writing. It was almost a sensory apparatus.

I’d considered digging up an old IBM Selectric for use during The Disconnect, but quickly rejected the idea. Somehow, introducing a new gadget—however vintage—seemed to run contrary to the spirit of the enterprise. Even more horrifying, I could envision the whole family fighting for access to anything resembling a keyboard. No. It was better to stay pure and suffer the joint pain in silence.

After a few weeks of fighting the good fight, I slunk off with my laptop to a café, where I could have my technology and eat it, too. The familiar feeling of a keyboard under my fingertips was an almost sensual delight, it embarrasses me to admit. I could practically hear the endorphins whooshing through my tech-deprived neural pathways. McLuhan was right. A pencil is an extension of a finger writing in the sand. But our electronic media are extensions of our
brains
.

 

 

Once their initial excitement-slash-envious-incredulity died down, every adult who heard about The Experiment asked me the same question: “But what about their homework?”

Sometimes the tone was reproving, other times giddy with wonder. “They’ll use the library of course,” I’d reply smugly. Privately, though, I was worried. True, the miasma of multitasking through which the kids had been wading in recent years was hardly what you’d call optimal work conditions. Eliot’s phrase “distracted from distraction by distraction” springs to mind. On the other hand, most of the time it did keep them at their desks with a homework window or two theoretically open. Some sort of assignment was generally under construction. And somehow or other it eventually got handed in. I very rarely policed anyone, and I’d certainly never been one of those parents who pitches in eagerly on “our” project on the vanishing dugong or the role of women at Botany Bay.

I didn’t think then, and I still don’t, that my kids’ homework is really my business. Maybe it’s a single parent thing, or maybe it’s a writer thing, or maybe it’s just a neglect thing. But whatever it is, it’s worked—more or less—for us. (I’ve since found out ours is hardly an isolated case. The evidence shows that teens whose parents help them with homework are actually
less
successful in school, after all other variables have been controlled, according to a study of “Adolescents’ Experience Doing Homework” published in 2008.
¹⁵
)

In point of fact, there’s not much evidence that homework is worth doing at all—by anybody. A recent study by University of Auckland researcher Professor John Hattie analyzed the effectiveness of 113 different teaching strategies. Homework straggled in at eighty-eighth. Hattie maintains he found “zero evidence” that homework helped to improve time-management skills, or indeed any other. He also observed that in the case of long-term projects, “All you’re measuring is the parents’ skills.”
¹⁶
Vindication! In fact, a morbidly obese body of research has been showing pretty much the same thing for a long time. Homework makes no difference to primary-school kids at all; it helps bright children more than the less able; and busyworkstyle worksheets are functionally meaningless.
¹⁷

I reminded inquirers I hadn’t banned anyone from using computers, only from using them in our home. “Yeah, well,
home
is where you’re supposed to do it,” Sussy muttered. “Hello? That’s why they call it
home
work.” Be that as it may, as the weeks progressed each child worked out his or her own modus operandi.

Anni was the only one who approached the challenge with zest. She was actually looking forward to working on assignments at the college library. “I’m hoping it’ll make me more organized,” she told me as she searched for the car keys in her underwear drawer. A talented student, she’d fallen into the nasty habit of relying on her writing gifts to cover a multitude of rhetorical sins (she must have gotten that from her father) and habitually crossed her deadlines by a pug’s nose. Like Proust, she wrote in bed and always had, ever since she’d gotten her first laptop in Year 8. Unlike Proust, she was also prone to spend entire evenings pimping her Facebook photos in there.

“It’ll be good to come home and know I
can’t
do any work, even if want to,” she added. Although the separation of work from leisure was something I was looking forward to as well, I noted Anni’s use of the word “can’t” with foreboding. Whereas I struggled womanfully to regain my mastery of paper and pen—and failed—the Digital Natives didn’t even go there. With the exception of Bill’s and Sussy’s math homework, it was as if they’d agreed that the whole concept of offscreen study was too outlandish even to try. I started to understand the point myself the day we went to uni to enroll Anni in her second-year courses and were told to go home and do it online.

“We
can’t
do it online at home,” I began, testily. I could sense Anni tensing up beside me. Maybe it was the fingernails drawing blood from my forearm. “And even if we could, why should we? We are here, in person and waving a checkbook. We don’t
need
to be online . . .” Anni pulled me away, giving an apologetic shrug to the woman behind the counter, as if to say, “Birth trauma. There’s nothing we can do, really.” We had no alternative but to head to the library, on the other side of campus, and use one of the public computers there. LOL when it turned out they were all offline, and we were told once again to go home and try again.

Bill shuddered at the mere mention of the “L” word. “But your school has an amazing library!” I enthused. “Full of books and, and shelves and ...”

“No way!” he cried, putting his hands before him fearfully as if fending off a rabid bat. He managed to do what he had to do at friends’ houses, efficiently and without fuss, usually on the Sunday night before an assignment was due. I never asked to see his work, and he never volunteered to show it to me. But his school report at the end of semester two—a week or so after The Experiment concluded—corroborated my impression that he had continued to work at school to his usual dependable level, my doubts about what the lad was actually learning there (if anything) notwithstanding. “An A in English? What’s
that
about?” jeered Sussy, reading over my shoulder.

“Stuffed if I know,” came the answer.

But the truth was, Bill
had
been reading
To Kill a Mockingbird
. There’d been sightings. In fact, the boy who since Year 4 had subsisted on a literary diet of
Mad
magazines and the backs of cereal boxes—reading one book (the latest
Harry Potter
) every two years, whether he needed to or not—was reading more or less constantly. By the middle of month two, his “dry” time—the time not afloat in the water-polo pool—was divided between saxophone, listening to jazz, and ripping through novels like a buzzsaw.

Over the summer holidays, sheer boredom had driven our hero to a full-scale Rowling retrospective, reading all seven books swiftly and in sequence. When he put down
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
, he looked as though he’d lost his best friend. “I finished,” he announced listlessly, as he opened the fridge door for a ritual check, just in case some junk food had spontaneously generated in the last forty-five minutes. For the next couple of days, I waited almost breathlessly to see what would happen. Would he start all over again with
The Philosopher’s Stone
and just keep cycling through for the next six months, stuck in a kind of Harry Potter purgatory? His friend came to the rescue with another series—something about wolves, or brothers, or maybe both. “Any good?” I ventured to ask as he neared the end of the fourth book. He shrugged. “I’m pretty sure I read them in Year Six, but yeah ...”

I ended up tossing him the Haruki Murakami book a few weeks later.
Kafka on the Shore
is structurally complex, intellectually demanding, and vaguely spiritual, in a Tarantino-meets-the-Dancing-Wu-Li-Masters kind of way. It was an improbable read for a fifteen-year-old with a literary underbite. On the other hand, it
was
Japanese—like Pokémon and Naruto and so many other of Bill’s pop-culture fixations. And it
was,
as of course I was soon reminded, full of jazz references. The next day, I asked him how it was going. “Good,” he answered. “Weird.”

“Promising,” I thought to myself. That was sometime in early March.

Two months later, by Bill’s sixteenth birthday in mid-May, he had stroked his way effortlessly across half of Murakami’s considerable oeuvre. To celebrate, I bought him the complete works, or as complete as Perth’s bookstores would permit. Even now, I have a hard time getting my head around that. For my son’s sixteenth birthday, I bought him eleven books
and he was thrilled
.

 

 

According to a 2009 survey by the Consumer Electronics Association, 83 percent of U.S. teens believe technology helps them with schoolwork and learning—and only 23 percent reported that their parents restricted their use of technology.
¹⁸
Yet research shows the impact of media on our children’s reading habits to be somewhere between negative and apocalyptic. News travels slowly, I guess.

But there are complications—and one of them is that our high-tech kids are not necessarily reading less, exactly. Nicholas Carr, writing in
The Atlantic
in 2008 on the question “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and more recently in
The Shallows
(menacingly subtitled “What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”), points out that all our frantic Web browsing and text messaging probably means we are reading more today than a generation ago, when television was the alpha medium. Today, however, “It’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of self”—as any parent who’s ever sneaked a peek at her teenager’s Instant Message conversation would agree.
¹⁹
(“Meh . . . WTF?! . . . Soz! . . . Bahhaha-hahahahahaha!”) And one of the major differences is to do with depth, or the lack thereof.

Reading in the age of the Internet is skim-deep. It stays on the surface, which is why they call it “surfing.” I prefer the more up-to-date term: “WILFing.” Shorthand for “What Was I Looking For?” WILFing refers to the habit of online free association that starts out with a specific purpose and ends up hours later ... well, let’s just say “elsewhere.” It’s not just kids who are afflicted by WILFing. Grown-ups are also at risk, even writerly types such as Nicholas Carr. “Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy,” he observes. “My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose . . . Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do . . . Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
²⁰

Maybe it’s an occupational hazard to which journalists are particularly prone. I had certainly noticed the same symptoms myself over the past couple of years. What Harold Bloom has called the “difficult pleasure” of reading at full length—and in full depth—was becoming a rarity. Literally, I felt I was forgetting how.

I’d always had problems with long-term relationships. But come on. A novel? I couldn’t commit to reading a whole novel? I’d put it down to hormones—those ever-obliging scapegoats—or maybe adult-onset ADHD.

And then The Experiment came along and forced me to take a closer look. And what I found was a very unpleasant family resemblance. Basically, I had developed exactly the same bad habits I criticized constantly in the kids—a sort of cognitive antsy-ness that took the form of boing-boing-boinging my way through a hundred sources and never settling down to digest any one of them. It seemed the menopause was
not
the message.