Kids Today
Author Bio
Don Sawyer is an educator and writer living with his wife, Jan, in Salmon Arm, B.C. He has retired from Okanagan College, where he taught adult education, served as the college’s ABE Department Chair and Director of the International Development Centre. He coordinated and managed five CIDA-funded development projects in West Africa, including the West African Rural Development Centre (WARD) project, shortlisted for the 2005 Canadian development project of the year.
Don Sawyer is the author of the award-winning young adult novel Where the Rivers Meet (Pemmican); a non-fiction account of his first teaching experiences in rural Newfoundland (Tomorrow Is School, Bendall Books); several children’s books, including The Meanest Teacher in the World and Miss Flint Meets the Great Kweskin (Chestnut Publishing); a series of novels for beginning adult readers, and numerous curriculum guides and manuals. His essays have appeared in most of Canada’s major newspapers.
Don Sawyer's sensitive portrayal of Nancy Antoine, a grade 12 Shuswap Indian in Where the Rivers Meet (Pemmican, 1989, $12.95), is based on Sawyer's observations as a teacher in the Fraser Canyon. The story is set in a fictional community, located at the confluence of two different coloured rivers (ie. the Thompson and Fraser Rivers). Frustrated with her largely irrelevant schooling and angered by the preventable deaths of her people on an unsafe bridge, she turns to her people's traditional culture for sustenance. After undergoing a puberty rite called ssqualmach, she returns to her school and successfully agitates for changes in its curriculum. "I chose the setting because it's dramatic," says Sawyer, "because of the rivers and the train bridge, but my main informant has been Mary Thomas, a Shuswap elder originally from Salmon Arm." Some of the proceeds of his book were donated to the Lytton and Mt. Currie Stein Preservation Fund and the Stein and Cultural Heritage Rediscovery Society.
Born in 1947, Sawyer emigrated from Michigan in 1969 to take Chinese Studies at UBC. He worked as a educator of aboriginal peoples for 15 years prior to writing Where the Rivers Meet. He has also written a handbook for aboriginal and multicultural classrooms, compiled a bibliography of Native Studies and co-authored with Howard Green, Tomorrow is School, an account of his introduction to teaching in a Newfoundland outport named Hoberly Cove. Donna Meets Coyote is his contribution to Secwepemc Cultural Education Society's educational series. Director of Native Adult Education in Salmon Arm, Sawyer expressed outrage at the systematic oppression of aboriginals in British Columbia. "We did some amazing things to these people. The Residential schools only closed in the 1960s. We've undermined the most fundamental aspects of people's ability to control their own lives." Don Sawyer and Howard Green also co-edited The NESA Bibliography Annotated for Native Studies (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, The Tillacum Library, 1983.)
His children's book The Lunch Bag Chronicles (Playfort Publishing, 2009) grew out of his parenting days. "For years I drew pictures attached to jokes on my daughters’ lunch bags. They liked them so much, they brought them home, and eventually I had collected over 1,000 bags. We have incorporated 80 or so, along with a light narrative, into the finished ms."
Kids Today
Essay
More than 40 years ago, Canadian media guru and philosopher Marshall McLuhan told us that we can only look at society through a rear view mirror. Like water to a fish, the forces shaping us – and their effects – are largely invisible.
McLuhan, who coined the term “global village,” saw, with astonishing prescience, how the move from print to electronic media was having, and would continue to have, a profound impact on every aspect of our lives. The introduction of new communication technologies, McLuhan said, is not a moral issue, good or bad, but one that carries great dangers because of our inability to understand them: "There can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the causalities and effects inherent in our technologies."
To say that we are living in a rapidly changing world may be the biggest understatement in human history. The internet has only been generally accessible to the public for about ten years. In 2004, 71% of Canadian households owned a computer, nearly twice as many as in 1998. In 2009, more people reported accessing news via the internet than a newspaper. Last year, only 45.7 percent of Americans read literature -- defined as novels, short stories, or poetry. This is a 10 percent decline since 1982, a loss of 20 million readers
While the full social effects of this breathtakingly rapid move to electronic media may not be fully recognizable, it is reasonable to expect to see the outcomes first, and most dramatically, in those most immersed in these new technologies, our children. And while the jury is still out, the results are unsettling.
• For the first time in a century, children’s IQ scores are dropping. A 2008 British study indicates that for those in the upper half of the intelligence scale, average IQ scores were six points lower than 28 years ago.
• A study commissioned by Lloyds of London showed that the average attention span had fallen to just 5 minutes, down from 12 minutes 10 years ago, with youth showing the most dramatic declines.
• There are indications that increasing use of computer games may result in neurological changes resulting from constant “downshifting” to primitive fight or flight responses built into most games. These could habituate the brain to a need for “extreme” experience or even “chronically affect blood pressure” and anxiety.
• The overuse of computers during children’s early development may also cause the prefrontal cortex (which regulates emotion, complex thought, and problem solving) to become idle resulting in a lazy or underdeveloped capacity for critical thinking and emotional empathy.
• Some studies indicate that the vocabulary of the typical American teen of today is less than half the size of the vocabulary of a teenager in the 1950s, representing “not merely a decline in numbers of words but in the capacity to think.”
• In an American survey, teenagers were able to recognize over 1,000 corporate logos but fewer than 10 plants and animals native to their locality.
• Less than one-third of 13 year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier. Among 17 year olds, the percentage of non-readers doubled over a 20 year period, from nine percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.
• On average, Americans aged 15-24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time reading.
So what’s going on? And what does it all mean? The first question is easier to answer. Dr Richard House, a British researcher on the effects television has on children, puts it succinctly: “Taking these findings [on reduced attention spans] at face value, it appears that there is something happening to teenagers. Computer games and computer culture has led to a decrease in reading books.”
New Zealand intelligence expert James Flynn concurs: “The demands made on teenagers' brainpower by today's youth culture may be stagnating. Leisure time is increasingly taken up with playing computer games and watching TV instead of reading and holding conversations.”
American educator and researcher Jane Healy writes, “The way children use computers may have powerful long-term effects on their minds. The main reason, of course, is that using any medium affects the underlying neural circuitry that is being established during childhood and adolescence. Before parents and educators become too excited about children using computers, the long-lasting neurological impacts must be taken into account.”
Indeed. But can we? McLuhan would seem to suggest that we can’t. He tells us that we may be doomed to blunder deeper into the computer age oblivious to the social consequences. At best, perhaps, we can only wonder, as Samuel Morse did in the first telegraph message he sent in 1844, “What hath God wrought?” Presumably, time will answer this question for us. But be careful. Those objects in your rear view mirror? They’re closer than they appear.
-- Don Sawyer
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