Do Not Disturb:
The internet is built on distraction. How many times have you gone online to look up something very smart and 20 minutes (or an hour) later you are taking a Buzzfeed quiz about what Taylor Swift song you are? For all the promise of technology making our lives easier, Siri and push notifications can seriously compromise our ability to stay on task and on track. And that’s for those of us whose prefrontal cortexes are fully developed – teens just simply don’t stand a chance.
Too often teens see lack of focus and distraction when trying to work online as a personal failing. Nothing could be farther from the truth. These phones and sites are designed, quite simply and quite purposefully, to hijack our attention. By explaining this to your teen – or showing them this article (or this one, or this one, or this one here), your teen can begin to see that needing supports to limit distractions are both normal and necessary. Here’s some best practices:
⊕ Set aside times when your student is ‘in class’. This should roughly correspond to a 45-1:15 minute class ‘block’ with 5-10 timed breaks in between. Have your teen use timers to mark these classes and breaks.
→ There are important possibilities that arise when classes move online, and many of these have to do with time flexibility (see next post), but you do want to keep up a ‘class schedule’ (at least at first).
⊕ During ‘class’ times have your teen use the Do Not Disturb function on their computer. This will stop the incoming barrage of notifications and allow your student to create a ‘class zone’ where they can focus free of distraction. You can reassure your teen that they will have breaks in-between ‘class time’ to check their snaps, instas and texts then. Because FOMO lives on…
→ This is how you turn on Do Not Disturb:
- On a Mac
- On a PC running Windows
- On Chromebooks popularly given out in many high schools.
⊕ For kids who have difficulty self-regulating, you may try blocking certain sites (you know the ones) during ‘school hours’. Caveat: kids are smart and they likely have ways around these controls. Thus, these should be last resorts.
→ This is how you can set up parental controls:
- On a Chromebook
- On an PC running Windows
- On a Mac
Click here to check out the next post in part 1, where I talk about the physical conditions you can help your teen create to foster strong home academic habits.
Stay well,
Coach Kaila
Note: Educational researchers know that virtual education can further compound the already existing social disparities that mark marginalized student’s educational worlds. While that is beyond the scope of these posts I encourage you to read about those – and the important work educators and activists are working to combat them. And I encourage those of you who can to donate their time, money, computers, etc. (links forthcoming).