A few weeks ago I learned that one of my students had several thousand unread emails in his inbox. There shouldn’t be anything surprising about this. He’s twelve years old and living in an era when everything that could go online, did. And he has, to put it mildly, a bit of trouble staying organized.
He’s not alone. I began asking my other students what their inboxes looked like. I found an interesting trend: there were a handful of students with only a couple unread emails, and then there were many others with hundreds or thousands. I almost wrote this off as statistical noise, but the trend in inboxes tracked quite clearly with another trend I’ve noticed since covid: when it comes to school, there are students who can hack it (with few unread emails), and others who cannot (with thousands of unread emails). I’m becoming increasingly convinced that being able to manage school has much more to do with managing email than it does with managing math.
When our schools moved to online instruction we took advantage of the tools that were available to us. Chief among them were email and video chat software like Google Meet. But implicit in that adoption was the idea that our students had the skills and self-control to manage tools that were actually built for adults, many of whom have a hard enough time managing them as it is.
It would be easy enough to put this on the students, to say that they need to develop their organization skills, that they need to practice more self control. And to a degree, that may be true. But we are the adults. It’s up to us to design an educational experience in which our students can be successful. That means helping them preserve their limited resources of organization and willpower.
So what should we do instead? We should think about what cognitive work is intrinsic to school (learning new vocabulary, practicing skills, etc.) and what is extrinsic (sorting emails, finding class notes, figuring out how to turn in an assignment, etc.). We must do everything we can as educators to minimize extrinsic work so that we can maximize available energy for intrinsic work. This will look different for everyone, but for my part, I’m sending fewer emails. There are entire books about this one specific topic so I won’t attempt to cover it here, but suffice to say that for hundreds of years schools functioned without any email at all.
Of course there will always be some extrinsic work for students to manage. But we shouldn’t take this to mean that there’s nothing we can do to minimize it. Instead, we should remove all the extrinsic work we possibly can and then teach them explicitly how to manage what’s left.
I wish I’d come to these realizations in August rather than January, but there’s another August right around the corner. And just because we’ve spent the past few years expecting our students to manage a bunch of digital tools that were designed for adults doesn’t mean it always has to be this way. School can be different. School can be better.