UPDATE: Can 10th graders go for a whole week without electronics?

It had been two days since they used anything.

            Octavio Cruz didn’t know what to do with himself on the first day so he rearranged his entire room. Jamila Martinez was waking up in the middle of the night, bashing her head into her pillow.

            “I didn’t think it was going to be this hard,” said Cesar Rodriguez. He had broken a lamp in his living room because he was playing soccer indoors to distract himself.

            It was a Friday afternoon and they were all dreading the weekend, unsure of how much longer they were able to abstain.

            “The weekend’s going to be the real killer,” said Andres Lopez.

            Shannon Meyer’s 10th grade homeroom class at the California Academy for Liberal Studies Early College High School was nearly halfway through the week during which they had vowed to give up using electronic devices. They called this extracurricular project a “media fast,” which meant no television, no video games, no Internet, no iPods or MP3 players, and no cell phones.

            “What I love about teaching teenagers is that they’re so willing to do anything,” said Meyer, when asked about her students’ initial reaction when she first pitched the project. “They’re not getting anything from it aside from the experience, so I was really interested to see their response.”

            “The fact that these students are willing to take it to the degree they’re taking it to is really fascinating and fabulous,” said Mara Simmons, the school’s instructional leader. “I think it gives good insight to the rest of us as to how connected or addicted we are to our devices.”

            “You really don’t know how obsessed you are with electronics until you let them go,” said student Angie Montes.

            Meyer’s advisory class began their media fast on a Wednesday. Two days had passed and they quickly realized that living a life unplugged, without their daily doses of text messaging, channel surfing and social networking had left a tremendous void in their lives. Adjusting to this new routine, they said, was much easier said than done.

            “I didn’t realize how boring things get,” said Lopez. “When I’m at school, I’m completely fine. It doesn’t even affect me whatsoever. But when [I’m] at home, I’m just sitting there, trying to figure out what to do… I just hear all the eerie silences. It kind of gets to you.”

“When I go home, I usually go to the kitchen table, turn on the TV and my MP3 player and do homework while texting,” said Montes, who admittedly sends an average of 500 text messages in one day. “I’m really antsy to get my cell phone.”

            “I think could probably go for longer than a week without everything but music,” said Cruz, who missed his MP3 player the most. “I need music for everything.”

            Marisol Vargas agreed and said she missed her iPod more than anything else. “I even sleep with an iPod on,” she said, “I feel so weird not having the headphones in my ears.”

            Martinez thought she would be the first to crack. She isn’t allowed outside her house because there are gangbangers in her neighborhood and she says the social networking site MySpace is her only connection to the outside world. “I have a BlackBerry with Internet,” she said. “It’s red hot right now in my pocket, I can feel it.”

            Meyer’s students were on an honor code for their week without electronics. Once they agreed to the media fast, the students and their parents signed contracts to make it official. They all kept journals to document their experiences and shared their daily entries with one another in homeroom class. Only one student in the homeroom class outright refused to do it. Meyer said she made him in charge of checking the other students’ journals, to make sure they were diligent about documenting their wire-free week. When asked to explain what exactly they were doing to replace the media outlets and devices that, according to most of them, were practically extensions of themselves, the students said that the trick was to busy themselves with other activities.

            “I help my sister with her homework and I’ve been talking to my mom more than usual,” said Vargas.

            “I’ve started singing to myself and trying to reproduce the music in my head,” said Jesus Alonzo. When asked if his singing sufficed at replacing his MP3 player, Alonzo shook his head. “No,” he said. “Sometimes I forget the lyrics.”

            Meyer first tried the media fast project at another high school, where she taught government and economics to seniors. Because California education standards required her to teach a unit on media and its influence on politics, she thought it would be interesting for her students to experience firsthand how they would fare if they cut out media from their everyday life.

            “The students immersed themselves in all the different media; it was a really meaningful experience for them,” said Meyer, “I thought it would be kind of cool to do the flip side of this, to un-immerse themselves in media. [They] kind of revolted when I first pitched the idea to them. I made it worth extra credit so it wasn’t mandatory.”

            Meyer teaches world history now, and media and politics aren’t part of her curriculum. So this time around, the media fast wasn’t worth anything more than the experiences her students were taking away from it. According to them, what they were learning by staying disconnected from their media outlets was how to reconnect with the real world.

            “I’m learning a lot about myself, the things I’m into, the things I want to do when I graduate from high school,” said Flor Salvador, “I’m starting to notice more things around me… I didn’t notice we had birds at our house.” Salvador also said that her parents were enjoying this media fast because she normally doesn’t talk to them, and when she does, it’s usually about her electronics.

            Cruz said that this media fast had also prompted more dialogue in his family. “We were in the car and my brother had turned on the radio, but I told him to turn it down,” he said, “He was asking why so I explained it to him and we just had a family conversation after that. I like that better than driving far away with the radio on and everyone’s just quiet.”

            “Now I’m just finding inner peace,” said Martinez.

            According to Todd Richmond, who teaches at USC, people born after 1995 are digital natives and have never known a world without the web, video games or television. These digital native kids are wired a little differently from those people who have lived in a world that predates digital technology and the Internet phenomenon. They are much more adept at dealing with multiple screens of communication than anyone before them. Whether they’re fully processing what is being communicated to them is a different question, according to Richmond.

            “For someone raised in a world of multiply stimuli, going to zero is going to be difficult,” said Richmond.

            On top of having to deal with simultaneous ways of communicating with others, Richmond said that digital native kids are also used to communicating with the limited language of digital technology. An example of this “asynchronous communication,” is the emoticons (or icons used to display emotion) used in instant messaging or text messaging. For digital native kids, it is much easier to communicate with these than it is to read facial expressions during a face-to-face conversation.

            “When you have face-to-face communication, you have an extraordinary number of cues to utilize [compared to limited communication via digital tools such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter],” said Richmond, “Neither is better or worse, they’re just very different… Both require practice for you to be good at it.”

            While Meyer’s students indulged in what some admitted was an alien concept of face-to-face communication during the first three days of their media fast, by Monday half of the class admitted that they cracked over the weekend. Nonetheless, Meyer is pleased with what her advisory class has taken away from the whole experience.

            “They’re always willing to be challenged,” she said. “I think most of the time they feel really underestimated sometimes… giving them a challenge like that really gives them a chance to shine.”

            When asked if he would recommend this exercise to other classes, Lopez said yes. “I think it’s a good thing that all teenagers should do,” he said, “They learn that there’s more than just the next text message… and they gain a new sense of mind.”

            “There’s kids in 5th grade who have cell phones and cameras and I didn’t have that when I was a 5th grader myself,” said Martinez. “There were other ways of entertaining ourselves before we had electronics… We don’t need them.”

“Just think, [it’s been] only a week and there’s people around the world that never even use this kind of stuff,” said Rodriguez. “We don’t need this stuff, it’s just an accessory.”