And It’s Only Gotten Worse…Sigh

Hello! Welcome to The Burning Hearth. I don’t normally write posts on the fly, but today is an exception. For the last several weeks, life has been, well…life. Everything has been on an abnormal time schedule and that has thrown me out of writing sync.

2026, thus far, has been about releasing my past. And since life has, for the moment, disrupted my writing routine, I have decided that I’m spending the duration of February going through every drawer and closet, shedding all the excessive weight that I have hidden in the dark corners of my house. Much of that involves files of old writing.

The first thing I opened today was an old notebook that I kept at my dance studio back in the day. While it is filled with many things like, Kayla needs some one on one attention on her extensions, it is also filled with notes of conversations my students had with me and between themselves.

With the exception of some editing for clarity this is what I wrote about a conversation two of my students were having in the fall of 2010. Notes: the distance between Pewaukee and Brookfield is roughly 10 miles. The friend being talked about lived in Brookfield at the time. In other words, she knew the area well.

Student:

“So, my friend was going over to her best friend’s house in Brookfield. She is at this friend’s house all the time. For some reason, she put her friend’s address into her GPS, and didn’t realize that it had flagged the same address in Pewaukee. She was almost all the way to Pewaukee before realizing she wasn’t going to her friend’s house.”

Under this quote, I wrote:

At least my students wondered why it took so long for it to kick in that she was on her way to Pewaukee.

Under that I wrote:

My questions are: Why would it even cross her mind to GPS and address she already knew? Why would she trust it more than her own brain?

Then I wrote: This is what makes me so sad and worried for this generation. They are so susceptible to being wrongly influenced. They believe the tech without question. It trumps their own experience.

That was in 2010. Now, most students at my daughter’s school don’t know how to read a map, have lost all interest in reading anything that challenges them, and thanks to AI, believe there is no reason to learn how, with their own hand, mind, and vocabulary, to communicate in writing their ideas. But wait, most of their ideas come from TikTok and Instagram, so not their ideas anyway.

I am afeared to look through the rest of this notebook, because I already know it is littered with story after story of similar things, like the time a student asked me if I had another student’s cell number. I told her no, but I had her home number. (This would have been long before the society-wide dumping of landlines.) I can still see the disgust on my student’s face as she told me she didn’t want to call her friend’s house. When I asked her why, she said, “What if one of her parents answers the phone?” This student was in 9th grade at the time.

My daughter was 1 in 2010, the last thing I wrote on this page was No way is Hannah getting a smartphone before she’s 16. If then. My daughter just turned 17 this month and still doesn’t have a smartphone, and that is now by her choice. (It is not kids having a phone that I have an issue with, it is a smartphone. Two very different creatures, as was proven to me by my students.)

I have often thought about adding a new blog to my post titled Make of It What You Will or, to follow LeVar Burton’s lead, #MOIWYW. This blog would simply be me sharing anecdotal stories from my teaching days, similar to this. If this is something you would be interested in, drop me a note in the comments. The truth is, I’m sad to say, I have so many stories.

Off to my purging!

Happy Heart’s Day to you all,

Constance