So we're into the holiday season. I'm also currently finishing the last week of trimester I and gearing up to start trimester II. Needless to say, I'm stressed.
As I was trying to relax the other night, I picked up my most recent copy of Glamour magazine and stumbled upon an article about the negative effects consistently high levels of stress can have on a person's health. The article described a variety of factors that contribute to high levels of stress, and one thing that was mentioned was people's reliance on, nay addiction to, technology. Women interviewed for the article told how they got antsy when they were forced to be away from the pinging chimes of their email inboxes and the dinging rings of their cellphones.
This got me thinking about an earlier blog post I wrote about everything being "better, faster, stronger" and wondering if that was a good thing. I'm coming back to that again. Is "better, faster, stronger" really that, or is it crazy, too fast, and stretching us beyond a point we can handle?
I have been emailing back and forth with a parent about her child's performance in my class. At one point, she suggested that a solution to her child's failing grade in my class would be that I should email her her child's upcoming assignments for my class every Friday. Fortunately, when we sat down face-to-face to conference, the counselor very tactfully suggested that that was an unrealistic expectation and the parent agreed. Do we assume that because a person has technology at their fingertips--email, an online Gradebook, whatever--that all of that person's work should/will get done faster? Because that forgets the most important part of the equation: the human doing the work. I may have tech tools, but I am still a human who has to do much of the data input, and I, like everyone else, only have 24 hours in a day.
I guess all I'm asking for is room to breathe. A little bit of let-up and a scaling down of the expectations of perfection and instant feedback. I am only human.
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